by Dave Itzkoff
A few days after he came back from Vancouver, Robin was stirred from a fitful evening of sleep, gripped by the certainty that some grave harm was going to befall Mort Sahl. He kept wanting to drive over to Sahl’s apartment in Mill Valley to check on him and make sure he was safe, while Susan had to repeatedly convince him that his friend was not in any danger. They went over it, again and again and again, all night, until they both finally fell asleep at three thirty that morning.
On May 28, 2014, Robin was finally given an explanation for the tangled lattice of sicknesses that had been plaguing him. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder that attacks the central nervous system, impairing motor functions and cognition, eventually leading to death. To Robin, it was the realization of one of his most deeply felt and lifelong fears, to be told that he had an illness that would rob him of his faculties, by small, imperceptible increments every day, that would hollow him out and leave behind a depleted husk of a human being. Susan tried to find some small shred of positivity in the ordeal—at least now Robin knew what he had and could focus on treating it. “We had an answer,” she said. “My heart swelled with hope. But somehow I knew Robin was not buying it.”
In a meeting with a neurologist, Robin asked several questions about his diagnosis. Did he have Alzheimer’s disease?, he wanted to know. Did he have dementia? Did he have schizophrenia? In each instance he was told no. Despite the encouragement he was offered, that Parkinson’s patients are often able to keep their symptoms in check once they find a medication they respond to, Susan said that Robin seemed unconvinced. “Robin couldn’t understand why his brain was out of control while at the same time he was being told, ‘We’re going to get this Parkinson’s managed and you’ll have another good ten years,’” she said.
Robin shared the news of his Parkinson’s diagnosis with his innermost circle: with his children, with his professional handlers, and with his most intimate friends. Crystal recounted the conversation in which Robin revealed the devastating news to him. “His number comes up on my phone,” he said, “and he says, ‘Hey, Bill.’ His voice was high-pitched. ‘I’ve just been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.’ I didn’t miss a beat. Because of my relationship with Muhammad Ali, I knew a lot of really good Parkinson’s research doctors. I said, ‘In Phoenix, the research center is great. If you want, we can get you in there. It would be totally anonymous. Do you want me to pursue that?’ ‘Would you?’”
“I never heard him afraid like that before,” Crystal said. “This was the boldest comedian I ever met—the boldest artist I ever met. But this was just a scared man.”
Among his associates who knew, there was unease: they were worried, of course, about Robin’s well-being but also concerned about whether he was in a position to receive the assistance he needed. “I don’t think the people around him knew how to handle it and how to help him,” Cyndi McHale said. “Look, it’s the perfect storm. He had a physical condition that was manifesting. He knew there was something wrong with his brain. And two of his best friends—my late husband and Christopher Reeve—ended up paralyzed in a wheelchair. So he’s thinking, okay, I’m losing control of my body. There’s something going on in my brain. I think he was just trapped.”
Robin’s children felt that it was now more important than ever to share time with their father. But doing so meant navigating past layer after layer of other people who also had access to him and wanted his attention—Susan; his assistant, Rebecca; his managers—and even this much resistance could discourage them from seeking him out.
“I would always make sure that Zak got time in front of his dad,” said his wife, Alex. “Zak would never ask for time—Zak would never push and I wouldn’t care if I looked pushy in front of his people. If he wanted to see his dad and have lunch with him, he’s going to do that.”
Like his father, Zak had a side to himself that was averse to conflict and hesitant to call attention to himself when he needed help. “That’s how Zak and Robin definitely are,” Alex said. “They could talk about something awful, but they’ll romanticize it. And you’re like, ‘Whoa, that sounds like a horrible experience.’ ‘No, it was awesome!’ How are you doing? ‘I’m great. I’m wonderful.’ That’s what Robin would always say. And that’s what Zak would also say. I feel the sadness. It’s like a generational sadness.”
It was a quality about the Williams men that Alex could never understand. “It’s the withdrawing, private side,” she said. “I still don’t understand it. It feels like the deepest part of the ocean. It’s still a mystery.”
When Robin did have time to get together with him, Zak could tell that his father was in anguish, and not only from the strain of his condition. “It was really difficult to see someone suffering so silently,” Zak said. “But I think that there were a series of things that stacked, that led to an environment that he felt was one of pain, internal anguish, and one that he couldn’t get out of. And the challenge in engaging with him when he was in that mind-set was that he could be soothed, but it’s really hard when you then go back into an environment of isolation. Isolation is not good for Dad and people like him. It’s actually terrible.”
Robin had been depressed for a long time, and Zak, too, had problems with anxiety. “But one of the ways in which we cope was to engage with people,” Zak explained. “Which is hard, too, because that can be self-perpetuating with anxiety, if you feel that the interactions aren’t going as you want them to go.”
Robin’s children had always been a dependable source of some of the purest, most natural joy he had experienced. But when he saw them now, they were also a reminder that he had chosen to end his marriage to Marsha and break up their home; it filled him with shame to think that he had inflicted the divorce upon them, and the shame compounded itself as he came to believe he had taken something perfect and corrupted it.
“He had told us numerous times that he had made a terrible decision,” Zak said. “That doesn’t relate to marriage or anything like that—it relates to separating himself from the day-to-day with his family. We’d say, ‘No, we’re here for you. We’re always here for you and we want to be supportive in whatever it is that you do. That’s important for us. At the end of the day, your happiness is what matters to us.’ And that was hard for him. Because he felt like he was letting people down. That was really difficult to witness.”
Even when his children told him that he had no reason to hold on to his guilt and nothing to apologize for, Zak said, “He couldn’t hear it. He could never hear it. And he wasn’t able to accept it. He was firm in his conviction that he was letting us down. And that was sad because we all loved him so much and just wanted him to be happy.”
At home, Susan saw Robin’s condition continue to worsen. When they tried to sleep at night, Robin would thrash around the bed, or more often he would be awake and wanting to talk about whatever new delusion his mind had conjured up. Robin tried many treatments to regain the upper hand over the disease: he continued to see a therapist, work out with a physical trainer, and ride his bike; he even found a specialist at Stanford University who taught him self-hypnosis. But each of these strategies could only do so much. In the meantime, Robin started sleeping in a separate bedroom from Susan.
From his perspective, Zak experienced Robin’s decline very differently. When they were not together, his father would often contact him to say that he was being made to spend time with friends of Susan’s and that he was deeply suspicious of them. “Dad would actually call me and text me, saying, ‘I’m hanging out with these people, I don’t even know who they are, and they feel like users,’” Zak recalled. “So that was upsetting to me. We thought the environment to be in was Marin, with his new wife. But when he seemed like he was in a perpetual state of anguish, that didn’t bode really well with us.”
Dana Carvey, who performed occasionally at the Throckmorton Theatre, had an unexpected encounter with Robin one evening on the streets of Mill Valley. “I was out on the sidewalk,”
Carvey said, “and it was kind of misty and dark.” He heard a voice calling to him, “Hello? Hello?” The speaker was Robin, who came up to him looking very pained. “He wanted to make amends to me, for taking material from me,” said Carvey, who answered that he could not think of anything Robin took from him. “He was really taken aback by that,” Carvey said. “For years, people had said to him that the phrase ‘Mr. Happy,’ referring to his dick, was mine. But I don’t think it was. I go, ‘Robin, I don’t believe that was mine.’ And I don’t think he ever believed me. So we had kind of an awkward exchange. I said, ‘I kind of accept that, but I tried to be you for four years.’ I realized later, this was not the way it was supposed to go. You’re supposed to say: ‘Thank you.’”
Eric Idle, who was in London that summer preparing for a Monty Python reunion show, tried unsuccessfully to persuade Robin to fly out there and make a cameo appearance at one of the performances. “And all the time I was getting emails from him, and he was going downhill,” Idle recalled. “Then he said he could come, but he didn’t want to be onstage. I said, ‘I totally get that.’ Because he was suffering from severe depression.” Through their mutual friend Bobcat Goldthwait, Idle said, “we were in touch, and in the end he said, ‘I can’t come, I’m sorry, but I love you very much.’ We realized afterwards he was saying goodbye.”
In June, Robin checked himself into the Dan Anderson Renewal Center in Center City, Minnesota, another Hazelden addiction treatment facility like the one where he had been treated in Oregon in 2006. Publicly, his press representatives said that he was “simply taking the opportunity to fine-tune and focus on his continued commitment, of which he remains extremely proud.” In fact, this rehab stay was Robin and Susan’s understandably inelegant fix for a problem that had no solution. At the very least, it kept Robin cloistered on a campus where he could receive close supervision, and where he could meditate, do yoga, and focus on further twelve-step work that, it was hoped, would help him manage his illness.
But other friends felt that Robin had no reason to stay at a clinic for drug and alcohol rehabilitation when he was suffering from an unrelated physical disorder. “That was wrong,” said Wendy Asher. “Robin was drinking when he went to rehab, and this wasn’t that. This was a medical problem. Susan thought everything would be fixed through AA, and it just wasn’t true.”
“Somebody that’s that depressed, and on medication for a medical condition, and the medication can cause depression, you just don’t tell them to work the twelve steps,” Cyndi McHale said. “He needed much more.”
Steven Pearl was one of Robin’s first friends to encounter him back in the Bay Area when he returned from Minnesota. Pearl was with his girlfriend, Nina, at a barbecue on July 12, when he saw Robin there with his friend Michael Pritchard, a fellow comedian and motivational speaker. Pearl was immediately struck by how much weight Robin had lost and how he did not seem to know who Nina was. “He always gave her a big hug and a kiss,” Pearl said. “He did not recognize her. It took him a minute to recognize me. He didn’t say a word. I knew something was really wrong. I asked Michael Pritchard, ‘Is he okay?’ And he goes, ‘No.’ And that’s all he said. I just thought it was depression and he’d come out of it.”
July 21 was Robin’s sixty-third birthday, but few of his friends seemed able to reach him and offer their warm wishes on the day. Cyndi McHale, who had the same birth date as Robin and had a regular tradition of speaking to him on the day, could not track him down; “I was on the phone with his managers’ assistant,” she said, “and she was just like, ‘He’s not doing well.’ That was a common line. Rebecca was just like, ‘No, he’s not doing well.’ I was really worried about him.” McHale had not seen Robin, either, at a recent birthday party for George Lucas, an event that he reliably attended. “When he didn’t go to that,” she said, “I thought, uh-oh, it’s really much worse than anybody is letting on.”
On the morning of July 24, Susan was taking a shower when she saw Robin at the bathroom sink, staring intensely at his reflection in the mirror. Looking more carefully at him, she noticed that Robin had a deep cut on his head, which he occasionally wiped at with a hand towel that had become soaked with blood. She realized that Robin had banged his head on the wooden bathroom door and began to scream at him, “Robin, what did you do? What happened?” He answered, “I miscalculated.” “He was angry because by now he was so mad at himself for what his body was doing, for what his mind was doing,” Susan later explained. “He would sometimes now start standing and being in trance-like states and frozen. He had just done that with me and he was so upset, he was so upset.”
The last time that Mark Pitta saw Robin at the Throckmorton Theatre was at the end of July, and the encounter left him cold. “I was scared,” Pitta said, “because it wasn’t my friend. I said, this has nothing to do with his TV show being canceled. He had a thousand-yard stare going. I just talked to him, I said, ‘Man, you’re not going to believe this. Somebody ran over my cat, twenty feet in front of my house.’ And Robin had absolutely no reaction, at all. I was like, uh-oh.”
Later in the theater’s green room, Pitta and Robin were mingling with another comedian who had brought his service dog. As Pitta recounted the scene, “I just casually said, ‘Another comedian I know has a service dog. The dog wakes her up when she chokes in her sleep.’ And Robin instantly said, ‘Oh, a Heimlich retriever.’ It got a huge laugh. He just sat there and had a little smile on his face.” When he and Robin left the theater at the end of the evening, Pitta said, “I gave him a hug and I said good-bye. He said good-bye to me three times that night. And he said it exactly the same way. He goes, ‘Take care, Marky.’ He said it three times, that way. And he was the only guy that called me Marky. No one calls me that.”
Zelda turned twenty-five on July 31, and that evening she celebrated her birthday with Marsha and Wendy Asher at a restaurant in Los Angeles. Robin wasn’t there, though he sent her a necklace and a card that read, “You will always be a star to me,” and everyone at the dinner was deeply concerned for Robin’s well-being. “I kept saying I’m really worried,” Asher recalled. “Then Marsha and I sat at a bus stop, talking about it, and Marsha was worried about it. I was told, from his managers, not to tell people he was depressed. The truth is, sometimes I wish I would have gone to his real friends and said, ‘This is going on.’ Maybe if everyone would have rallied around or something—you always think that, don’t you?”
One evening in early August, Robin made one of his intermittent visits to Zak and Alex’s house in San Francisco, as he did when Susan was out of town. This time she happened to be in Lake Tahoe, and Robin showed up to see his son and daughter-in-law like a meek teenager who realizes he’s stayed out past his curfew; he was always welcome there, but he carried himself with mild discomfort, as if he still needed someone else’s permission to be in their home. At the end of the night, as Robin was preparing to head back to Tiburon, Zak and Alex asked him what it would take to keep him at their house—would they have to tie him up and throw a bag over him?
“Well, that was a joke,” Zak said with a bittersweet laugh. “To be clear, that was a joke. But we didn’t want someone who seemed like he was in so much anguish to leave. We wanted him to stay with us. We wanted to take care of him.”
It wasn’t that Robin was ashamed to accept help from his son, Zak later explained. “I don’t think so, no,” he said. “He wanted to be independent and be who he was, taking care of himself. I think there was an element that he didn’t want to inconvenience us.”
On the night of August 10, a Sunday, Robin and Susan were home together in Tiburon when Robin began to fixate on some of the designer wrist watches that he owned and grew fearful that they were in danger of being stolen. He took several of them and stuffed them in a sock, and, at around seven p.m., he drove over to Rebecca and Dan Spencer’s house in Corte Madera, about two and a half miles away, to give them the watches for safekeeping. After Robin came home, Susan started getting
ready for bed; he affectionately offered her a foot massage, but on this night, she said she was okay and thanked him anyway. “As we always did, we said to each other, ‘Goodnight, my love,’” Susan recalled.
Robin went in and out of their bedroom several times, rummaged through its closet, and eventually left with an iPad to do some reading, which Susan interpreted as a good sign; it had been months since she’d seen him read or even watch TV. “He seemed like he was doing better, like he was on the path of something,” she later said. “I’m thinking, ‘Okay, stuff is working. The medication, he’s getting sleep.’” She saw him leave the room at around ten thirty p.m. and head to the separate bedroom he slept in, which was down a long hallway on the opposite side of their house.
When Susan woke up the next morning, Monday, August 11, she noticed that the door to Robin’s bedroom was still closed, but she felt relieved that he was finally getting some needed rest. Rebecca and Dan came over to the house, and Rebecca asked how the weekend had gone with Robin; Susan optimistically answered, “I think he’s getting better.” Susan had been planning to wait for Robin to wake up so that she could meditate with him, but when he wasn’t awake by ten thirty a.m., she left the house to run some errands.
By eleven a.m., Rebecca and Dan were concerned that Robin still had not come out of his room. Rebecca slipped a note under the door of Robin’s bedroom to ask if he was okay but received no response. At 11:42 a.m., Rebecca texted Susan to say she was going to wake Robin up, and Dan went to find a stepstool to try to look through his bedroom window from the outside of the house. In the meantime, Rebecca used a paper clip to force open the lock to the bedroom door. She entered the room and made a horrifying discovery: Robin had hanged himself with a belt and was dead.