Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  On the play’s official opening night of March 31, 2011, Robin was showered with notes of celebration and good wishes, sent by his friends and representatives, that ran the gamut from formal sincerity to inappropriate silliness. His CAA agents passed along a card saying they had symbolically adopted a tiger through the World Wildlife Fund, while his managers sent a phony autographed picture of the stage-magic duo Siegfried and Roy, whose cofounder Roy Horn had been mauled in a 2003 tiger attack. The fake inscription read, “To our big cat, We would love to give you a kiss on your opening, but we are in Las Vegas.” It was signed, “Siegfried + What’s left of Roy.”

  The major reviews of the play were exuberantly positive and seemed to promise a healthy commercial run, with plenty of praise directed at Robin for his interpretation of the wisecracking Tiger. The New York Times, in an appraisal written by Charles Isherwood, called Bengal Tiger a “smart, savagely funny and visionary new work of American theater.” Though Isherwood deemed Robin’s casting a “standard concession to the celebrity-centric economy of today’s theater,” he also wrote that “the kinetic comic who has sometimes revealed a marshmallowy streak in movies, never indulges the audience’s hunger for displays of humorous invention or pinpricks of poignancy. He gives a performance of focused intelligence and integrity, embodying the animal who becomes the play’s questioning conscience with a savage bite that never loosens its grip.” The Hollywood Reporter had its own unique take: “Think of him as Lenny Bruce meets Friedrich Nietzsche in the body of a man-eating predator.”

  But Bengal Tiger failed to capture the attention of theatergoers. Audience members who were drawn in by Robin’s name and the promise of seeing him live onstage were presented with a challenging work, unlike anything he had previously appeared in and not so easy to laugh at. Just look at the marquee of the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Moayed observed: “It says Robin Williams, and then, underneath it, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. The title is so funky that it could be the title for a comedy. After the first previews, I’d always go to the ushers and be like, ‘What are they saying?’ And they’re like, ‘By intermission, they’re like, we thought this was stand-up.’ So that was definitely part of the case.”

  Robyn Goodman, its lead producer, pointed to a fundamental mismatch between the material and what ticket buyers expected of Robin. “If you take a famous singer and you put them in a play where they don’t sing, audiences really don’t want to see them,” she said. “We were still embroiled in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it had the word Baghdad in the title. I don’t think people wanted to see a play about war at that point.”

  In a further setback, when nominations for the Tony Awards were announced on May 3, Robin was shut out of the category for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role in a Play. Bengal Tiger was not among the contenders for Best Play, either, though Moayed was nominated for Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Play. One of the congratulatory phone calls Moayed received after the announcement was from Robin. “He called me that morning,” Moayed said, “and I was very uncomfortable. I was sad, but I didn’t want to show him that. And I remember saying, ‘Robin, I can’t believe it. I’m so sorry you didn’t get nominated. I feel terrible about it.’ And he goes, ‘Ah, forget it. Don’t worry about it. Hey, what can you do?’” Robin seemed more concerned the play itself had been overlooked. “You could hear it in his voice,” said Moayed. “He goes, ‘That just doesn’t make any sense.’ He was feeling what we were feeling.”

  In a separate conversation with Rajiv Joseph, the playwright, Moayed said, “I just broke down in tears, because I was like, this is not fair. This wasn’t the point. Robin is so fucking good in this. I was like, he’s a fucking star and he deserves it. When he didn’t get nominated, the whole thing felt like a fuck-you, to be quite honest.”

  Joseph said that the lack of a Tony nomination for Robin was a bitter blow to the show’s cast and collaborators. “We wanted him to have an EGOT,” Joseph said, referring to the rare show-business achievement of winning an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony. “He deserved one. It was a real tough year, but that made me mad, that he didn’t get a nomination. I think he deserved one.” Despite the snub, Robin dutifully appeared as a presenter at the Tony Awards in June to announce the winners for Best Book of a Musical. (“This is an incredible room,” he said to the audience at the Beacon Theatre. “The only beard here is on my face.”)

  On July 3, Bengal Tiger closed, having played just 108 performances. Though this was a disappointment by Broadway standards, producer Robyn Goodman said she did not want Robin to be discouraged by the experience. “I wrote Susan afterwards,” she explained, “and I said, ‘Please tell Robin not to be angry at Broadway or the audiences or the Tony voters. Sometimes you hit the zeitgeist, and sometimes you’re against the zeitgeist. And he was so wonderful that he must at some point come back to Broadway and do a play again. This shouldn’t be his last experience.’”

  Robin turned sixty on July 21, and while his journey to this age had hardly been free of grievous injury and physical catastrophe, at least he could say that the past year was markedly healthier than those that had immediately preceded it. About the worst he had suffered physically was the development of a slight, intermittent tremor in his left hand, which he believed was the lingering result of a past shoulder injury. Back in the Bay Area, he celebrated his birthday a few days early, on July 16, at the Cavallo Point luxury hotel and lodge in Sausalito. The invitations were embossed with the silhouette of a hummingbird, an animal whose energy, flightiness, and constant movement seemed to perfectly embody the evening’s honoree, and the guest list consisted of almost every valued person who had figured into Robin’s life, even the cast members from Bengal Tiger, who were flown out to California for the occasion. Robin danced with Susan; he danced with Billy Crystal’s wife, Janice; he danced with Crystal.

  Throughout the evening, attendees could watch a continuous video loop of birthday testimonials recorded by friends, collaborators, and loved ones, including Susan (who painted him a picture of a cupcake), Steven Spielberg, Larry Brezner, Al Pacino, Barry Levinson, Chris Columbus, Peter and Wendy Asher, Whoopi Goldberg, and Robert De Niro. Even Mort Sahl, the irascible satirist and nightclub comedian of the 1950s and ’60s, who had also become a regular at the Throckmorton Theatre and a friend of Robin and Susan’s, contributed warm words of encouragement. “Your life is like a movie,” Sahl said in his video segment. “And in this movie, you get the girl.”

  The celebration was something of a dry run for the more intimate event that followed three months later, when Robin and Susan were married on October 22, 2011. The outdoor wedding ceremony was held at the Meadowood Napa Valley resort in front of about 130 guests, including Robin’s three children and Susan’s two sons; the bride was dressed in a strapless ivory and blush-colored gown with a train, while the groom wore a tuxedo. Robin’s best man was Bobcat Goldthwait, who had also put together an unusual bachelor party for him at a Tiburon restaurant. Mark Pitta recalled, “Bobcat decided to get a fat stripper to dress like Charlie Chaplin. I was looking at Mort Sahl like, when is this going to end? I can’t eat my food.”

  The ceremony was officiated by the Reverend Peadar Dalton, a former Catholic priest whom Robin had seen speak at a memorial service. “He said he was particularly touched with my analogy of death being similar to birth,” Dalton said. “I had said that when a baby is born they don’t know what they are being born into—but they are being born into a fuller experience of life and love with their families. Death is the same. In my opinion we are not dying—we’re born into another experience that is greater than ourselves and that is an extension of what it is to love and be loved.”

  Though the nuptials had been meant to end with the release of trained doves, nature intervened with an earlier display. “This white butterfly appears out of nowhere and goes straight down the aisle and flies over, between them and above them, and flies away,” the comedian Rick Overton recalled.
“Who pays for that service? Everyone’s getting their phones out, looking on Google—who does that? If I’m the dove guy, I’m going, ‘Oh, well, fuck me. I’ve got the whole dove thing and this butterfly shows up?’ It just happened. We chose to make that a good omen.”

  The reception that followed seemed to encapsulate the life of a man who had touched the summit of superstardom but treasured his perception as a man of the people. There was a caricature artist, like the kind that would be found at a street fair; there were the working-stiff comics Robin knew from the Throckmorton; and there were the guests who were so famous they intimidated the other guests. “It was like high school,” said Mark Pitta. “There was a clique going on. I was talking to people that I knew, then I look over and there was Billy Crystal and Bobcat and George Lucas, all off to the other side. Like. But Robin was like a host. He said hi to everybody, spent time with people, made sure everything was cool.”

  The wedding was a more fraught affair for those friends of Robin’s who also felt they owed their allegiance to Marsha and were not sure whether to attend the ceremony. Even for Peter and Wendy Asher, it was a divisive proposition; Peter went to the wedding but Wendy did not. As Peter explained, “When people break up and someone has a new girlfriend, and then gets remarried, it’s tricky. So one approaches that with a combination of diplomacy and tact, and trying to be as loyal to everyone as possible. It’s a tough call. I got to know Susan a bit. I never felt like I knew her particularly well. She seemed very pleasant.”

  As Robin and his new wife prepared to spend their honeymoon in Paris, all that Susan was concerned with was a long and joyous future together with her husband. “I remember feeling that we had not met too late in life,” she said. “We met right on time.”

  19

  GONE

  Why?

  It was a question that crossed Robin’s mind more often these days, now that he had put in roughly thirty-five years as a professional entertainer and more than sixty as a human being. What did he still get out of doing what he was doing, and why did he feel the compulsion to keep doing it? He had already enjoyed nearly all of the accomplishments that one could hope for in his field, tasted the richest successes, won most of the major awards. “He can retire right now, for god’s sake,” his friend David Letterman said of him during a Late Show appearance from this period. “He’s going to the hall of fame.”

  He could hardly believe the speed at which time had flown by, taking him from a hungry newcomer to a champion in his field to, well, whatever he was now. “We were just kids,” Robin told the host, “and now we’re old and—”

  “Irrelevant,” Letterman said.

  “Incontinent,” Robin said. “Incontinent and irrelevant. That sounds like a comedy team. Please welcome Incontinent & Irrelevant.”

  Every stage of his career had been an adventure into the unknown, an improvisation in its own right, but there was truly no road map for where he was now. Everything came to an end at some point; it was a reality he accepted and confronted so often in his work, even as he tried to outrace it. What would it look like for him, he wondered, when he wrapped things up and told the crowd good night for the last time? How could it be anything other than devastating? He had known few other peers who had made it to this phase of life with their bodies and their reputations intact, and it rarely ended well for any of them.

  The work was less abundant than it used to be and nowhere near as lucrative, and so much of it seemed to be focused on finality, particularly in the form of death. In August 2012, he had appeared in an episode of Louie, the cable TV comedy written by and starring the comedian Louis C.K., that begins with both men meeting at the grave of a comedy club manager who has recently died, and whom they both privately despised. “When he died I felt nothing,” Louie tells Robin. “I didn’t care. But I knew, when I pictured him going in the ground and nobody’s there, he’s alone, it gave me nightmares.” Robin replies, “Me too.”

  On a lark, they visit a seedy strip club frequented by their deceased acquaintance, only to find that everyone else there—the strippers, the DJ—is mourning the loss of the generous man the two comedians never knew. On their way out of the club they turn to each other in understanding.

  “Do me a favor?” Robin requests.

  “I’ll go to yours,” Louie answers him.

  “Whoever dies first?” Robin asks.

  And that’s all they need to say to each other.

  Later that fall, Robin was in New York making a film called The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, another morbid indie comedy, in which he plays its title character, a surly lawyer who is diagnosed with an aneurysm and told he has ninety minutes to live. In one scene, the character jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River, but he survives, and he is dragged from the water by the doctor who, it turns out, has falsely diagnosed him. When he described the creation of this sequence to Letterman, the host had asked him if he needed a gamma globulin shot, and Robin answered, “I didn’t get a shot, and I hope it doesn’t end up, twenty years from now, I’m not like Katharine Hepburn, going, [quavering voice] ‘E-very-thing’s fi-ine.’”

  So why did Robin persist in making these films, each one a far cry from the Hollywood features he had once thrived on, and which were lucky to receive even a theatrical release? Why did he continue to fill every free block of time in his schedule with work, whatever work he could find? Yes, he needed the money, especially now that he had two ex-wives and a new spouse he wanted to provide with a comfortable home. “There are bills to pay,” he said. “My life has downsized, in a good way. I’m selling the ranch up in Napa. I just can’t afford it anymore.” He hadn’t lost all his money, but, he said, “Lost enough. Divorce is expensive.”

  Financial pressures did not fully account for Robin’s relentlessness; he worked because he enjoyed it, because he got something out of it, because he wanted to. In the spring of 2012, he was given something called the Stand-Up Icon Award at the Comedy Awards in New York—a noncompetitive prize dreamed up by Comedy Central, for a ceremony that the cable channel had held only once before and would never broadcast again. Robin begrudgingly accepted, even though he felt that the whole idea of a comedy awards show was “like a bake-off for bulimics.”

  Still, when he received the prize at a gala ceremony at the Hammerstein Ballroom on April 28, he was genuinely touched to be able to share a room with hipper, younger comedy stars like Patton Oswalt, Chris Rock, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler; elders like Don Rickles; and industry pals like Robert De Niro. Following an introduction from Oswalt, Robin began by holding up his new trophy and saying, “Thank you for this lovely platinum Ambien, this lovely R2-D2 illegitimate child. Thank you.” He spotted Susan in the audience and added, “Tonight, my darling Susan, you’ll be fucking an icon.”

  He thanked those comedic forefathers, like Jonathan Winters, who had been his personal inspirations, and those, like Mort Sahl, who had lately become his friends. Given the setting and the circumstances, he could not resist a little retrospective self-deprecation. “You start off doing comedy, and it’s a long time ago,” he said. “You have an open-mic night. You sign up. You get on late at night. They give you three minutes. Thirty-seven years later, I come on here, I get this [the award] and three minutes. Thank you. Fuck off.”

  Something to him felt right, or at least familiar, about ending up back at the same place he had started out professionally. “It’s like life,” Robin said. “You start off in diapers, you end up in diapers. The bottom line is, I am one of the luckiest fucks in show business. I’m so goddamn lucky. The only difference between me and a leprechaun is, I snorted my pot of gold.”

  Winters, his first real comedy hero and the one most responsible for influencing the performer that Robin became, died of natural causes the following April, at the age of eighty-seven. Winters had always been grateful for the friendship of the onetime student who had outstripped the master, and for the gifts of toy soldiers that Robin occasionally bestowed on him; Winters c
ould be needy, too, and was ashamed of his own neediness. In one of the many letters he wrote to Robin over the years, he implored his old pal to get together with him soon, “before I take the ‘great escalator north!’” After Winters’s death, Robin wrote an essay of appreciation for the New York Times in which he reflected on his friend’s compulsion to joke about everything he had encountered or experienced, even the depression that had shaped his dour, stone-faced demeanor. As Robin wrote:

  His car had handicap plates. He once parked in a blue lane and a woman approached him and said, “You don’t look handicapped to me.”

  Jonathan said, “Madam, can you see inside my mind?”

  Robin had continued to bounce from one low-budget film to the next; a rare exception in this period was his small role as President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the biographical film Lee Daniels’ The Butler, a brief appearance that critics simply refused to countenance (“especially egregious,” one wrote of the performance). But he finally seemed poised for a professional resurgence when he was cast in The Crazy Ones, a new CBS comedy show that would make its debut in September 2013. The series was Robin’s first ongoing television role since Mork & Mindy ended three decades earlier, casting him as Simon Roberts, the irrepressible, not yet over-the-hill cofounder of a fast-paced Chicago advertising agency he runs with his straitlaced daughter (Sarah Michelle Gellar). When he first met with the series’ creator, David E. Kelly, Robin recalled, “He basically sat me down and said, this is my idea for a show. Father-daughter advertising firm, father’s kind of an idea man, but he’s had an interesting life. Multiple marriages and rehab—I went, ‘I’ve done the research.’ The daughter’s there to back him up, but the father’s trying to get her to be more creative.”