by Dave Itzkoff
20
EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY
Susan said good-bye to Robin later that afternoon. In a bedroom that had been furnished for adolescent boys, outfitted with a bunk bed, video game consoles, and school supplies, she stood beside him and spoke to him. “Robin,” she said, “I’m not mad at you. I don’t blame you at all. Not one bit. You fought so hard and you were so brave. With all my heart, I love you.” She stroked his hair, looked over his face, and gave his forehead a final kiss. She and a sheriff’s chaplain prayed over his body before it was strapped to a gurney and taken away.
The 911 call had come in at 11:55 a.m. Medics were on the scene by noon, and Robin was pronounced dead shortly after. There were no attempts made to resuscitate him. A sheriff’s deputy investigated the scene and found no suicide note; a further search of Robin’s cell phone, including phone calls, e-mails, text messages, and Internet history turned up no evidence that he was contemplating suicide or communications to other people that he was preparing to do it. The Web browser on his iPad had a few open tabs, where he had been looking at online discussion groups for medications like Lyrica, which is used to control seizures, and propranolol, a beta-blocker. His laptop, which he rarely used, had nothing significant on it. A toxicology report would later show that the only drugs in Robin’s system at the time of his death were Mirtazapine, an antidepressant, and Sinemet, which treats the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.
Susan was asked, in the course of the police investigation, if Robin had ever discussed suicide with her and she said he hadn’t, not even after he was given his Parkinson’s diagnosis. She had no reason to believe he had ever researched methods of suicide or hanging specifically, though Rebecca and Dan mentioned that the character of Robin’s son in his movie World’s Greatest Dad had also died in a similar—but accidental—manner and that the scene had been very emotional for Robin to film.
Before Robin hanged himself, he had placed a folded towel between the belt and the skin of his neck, possibly to reduce pain. When the deputy examined Robin’s body, he found what he described as several “superficial vertical and horizontal cuts” on his left wrist that “had a scant amount of blood present.” There was also dried blood on a pocketknife found in the bedroom, and on a washcloth left in the adjoining bathroom.
Robin was gone, but beyond that inescapable fact, nothing was certain and nothing made sense. Though his recent months had been suffused with anguish, he had given no explicit indication to anyone that he wished to end his life. The scene of his suicide, which he orchestrated and implemented alone, revealed no other indications of why he’d done it—why now, why at all—or what he might have wanted to say in his final communication to the people he loved most. Now his mortality was a police matter and soon to be an issue of public record. Before anyone had time to mourn his passing, let alone process it, or to begin to seek answers to the questions that would surely be asked of them, they had to tell the whole world that Robin Williams was dead.
The first announcement came about three hours after his death, in the form of a news release from the Coroner Division of the Marin County Sheriff’s Office. Beneath a banner headline that read “Investigation into Death of Actor Robin Williams,” it explained, in clinical, dispassionate language, that an emergency telephone call had been made earlier that morning, reporting “a male adult” who “had been located unconscious and not breathing inside his residence.” Emergency personnel were dispatched and the man, “pronounced deceased at 12:02 pm has been identified as Robin McLaurin Williams, a 63 year old resident of unincorporated Tiburon, CA.” A second paragraph explained that police were conducting an investigation into his death, though “the Sheriff’s Office Coroner Division suspects the death to be a suicide due to asphyxia.”
About an hour later, Robin’s publicist, Mara Buxbaum, put out a short statement:
Robin Williams passed away this morning. He has been battling severe depression of late.
This is a tragic and sudden loss. The family respectfully asks for their privacy as they grieve during this very difficult time.
Buxbaum also shared a message from Susan:
This morning, I lost my husband and my best friend, while the world lost one of its most beloved artists and beautiful human beings. I am utterly heartbroken. On behalf of Robin’s family, we are asking for privacy during our time of profound grief. As he is remembered, it is our hope the focus will not be on Robin’s death, but on the countless moments of joy and laughter he gave to millions.
Even in an age of instantaneous information, the news of Robin’s death was absorbed and circulated with bewildering speed. The incident offered an unparalleled example of a public figure who was recognized in every part of the globe and whose reputation for joyfulness and humor stood in stark opposition to the shocking and solitary manner in which his life came to an end. The whole world seemed to know, all at once, that he had died and was reacting to the incomprehensible event in unison. As only a few occasions in history are capable of doing, it had cloaked the planet in a shadow of sadness. Everyone who knew him experienced it, wherever they were, and everyone felt as if they knew him.
Rick Overton was stuck in standstill traffic on a Los Angeles highway when he got a phone call from Greg Travis, a friend and fellow comedian. “He goes, ‘Oh, man, did you hear about Robin?’” Overton said. “I go, ‘What about Robin?’ He goes, ‘Oh, he just died.’” Overton’s first impulse was to dismiss the report as “another one of those Internet clickbait bullshit rumors”—just two years earlier, Robin had been the victim of an Internet hoax that alleged he had fallen to his death while shooting a film in Austria—but as he pulled off the highway, Overton began to notice other cars frozen in place, drivers and passengers with their mouths agape. “My heart needed it to be another fake story,” he said. “I was hoping and coaxing the universe to rewrite it that way, because I was going into shock. I didn’t want it to be true.”
Without yet having heard all the details, Overton already knew the cause of Robin’s death. “It was a death of a thousand cuts,” he said. “But these were massive cuts. Each was a sword blow. For a guy who’s known for his freedom and mobility, to find out he may not have that anymore—his facility of speech may not be his anymore; access to a quick thought might not be his anymore. All his trademark things, everything he has identified his personality with—it’s like, holy shit, what are you going to do?
“All of that said,” Overton added, “he would not have abandoned his family when in his right mind. He would have endured all of that, unless something shorted out. He wasn’t Robin at that point. He stopped being the guy we know. That part shut down.”
David Letterman was vacationing on his ranch near Glacier National Park in rural Montana, with a group of friends that included Paul Shaffer, Bill Murray, and the actor and comedian Tim Thomerson, when the news reached him. As a fellow survivor of heart surgery, Letterman said, “It just didn’t make any sense to me. After what these guys did for me—they opened me up, they took my heart out, they put me on a heart-lung machine for forty-two minutes. And then they put your heart back in and they stitch you back up. After people have gone to that trouble, the last thing in the world you’re going to do is ruin it by killing yourself.”
Murray was even more visibly stricken. “He couldn’t catch his breath,” Letterman said. “He kept hyperventilating. I thought he was going to have a heart attack.” When the group was able to calm down somewhat, Murray shared a story from the 2004 Academy Awards, the year he was considered a strong favorite to win the Best Actor trophy for Lost in Translation but instead was edged out by Sean Penn, for his performance in Mystic River. As Letterman recounted, “He said that later that night, Robin came up to him. They certainly didn’t know each other well, and Robin said, ‘Bill, please don’t worry about this. This will happen for you.’ Bill was very touched at this guy, who he did not have that sort of relationship with, who took time to be generous and nice about that.”
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To Letterman and his friends that day, it seemed unfathomable that a man whose astonishing talents left them feeling inadequate had decided his life no longer had value. “Robin could fly, God damn it,” Letterman said. “It was the diametric opposite of what his life was. It was almost like, you’re never going to suffocate this energy. And then, at the end, he chose to do so. The suffering must have been inestimable.”
That evening in New York, Jeff Bridges was attending the red carpet premiere of The Giver, a science-fiction film he’d been trying to get made since the 1990s, but all that anyone in attendance could think about was Robin. “It was just the most bizarre mixture of deep, deep sadness and celebration for this thing that I’d been trying to give birth to for twenty years,” Bridges said. “All these emotions are running through my heart and mind, and then we see the movie, and then we go have a party. All of a sudden, I look at the window, and I fucking see Robin. And he’s coming towards me. I get out of the car, I can’t believe it, and then I realize, no, it’s not Robin.” Instead, Bridges realized he was looking at Radioman, the transient photographer and film-set loiterer he and Robin had often crossed paths with during the making of The Fisher King. The fact that he had encountered Radioman on this particular night, Bridges felt, was a sure sign that Robin was trying to reach out to him from whatever part of the cosmos he now occupied. “Radioman is crying, and I’m crying, and we just hug each other,” he said. “Robin’s spirit was there with us.”
It was now late at night in London, where Terry Gilliam was watching a rerun of the animated TV series Family Guy, a willfully outrageous cartoon that often used Robin as a satirical punching bag. In the particular episode that Gilliam happened to catch, the show’s protagonist, Peter Griffin, comes to the ironic and uncomplimentary conclusion that Robin is not sufficiently appreciated (“Robin Williams has a manic gift that gladdens a sad world, and all he asks in return is our unceasing attention!” the character declares), and he wishes that everyone could be Robin Williams: a wish that comes true, transforming all his friends and family members into needful, overemoting caricatures of Robin. Gilliam watched the show and went to sleep. Had he stayed up just a few minutes later, he would have caught the BBC’s first breaking news reports about Robin’s death, but instead he learned about it the next morning, still rattled by the Family Guy segment he’d seen the night before.
“I went to bed with that floating around in my head, then woke up in the morning to be told Robin died,” Gilliam said. “Robin dealt with forces far greater than most of us understand, and he controlled them in weird ways. In the moment he was thinking, ‘Nobody loves me anymore,’ another side of his brain was getting Family Guy on the air in England, where everybody becomes Robin Williams.”
Knowing Robin as well as he did, Gilliam said he could almost appreciate the forces that had driven him to suicide. “Robin had a very big head to be alone in,” he said. “I understand it. I stare at my computer screen, when you’ve got the screensaver going through all the photographs of the world and your life, and it’s infinitely intriguing. No thinking. You don’t exist anymore. That’s the key to it. Anybody with what Robin had, you want to not exist.”
Beneath his grief for his fallen friend, Gilliam could not deny the presence of another emotion he had not expected to feel, and that was anger. “I’m really pissed off at Robin,” he said, half joking and half serious. “I’m getting more and more angry at him. He’s such a selfish bastard, solving his problem, but what about the rest of us?”
Several American late-night shows were still being taped as word of Robin’s death circulated, and their hosts felt obliged to share the news with their viewers. In the closing minutes of his Monday night broadcast, a shaken-up Conan O’Brien told his studio audience, “This is unusual and upsetting, but we got some news, during the show, that Robin Williams has passed away.” As an audible rumble of confusion passed through the crowd, O’Brien continued, “By the time we air—we tape these shows a few hours early, and by the time you see this now, on TV, I’m sure that you’ll know. I’m sorry to anyone in our studio audience, that I’m breaking this news. This is absolutely shocking and horrifying and so upsetting on every level.” On The Tonight Show the following evening, Jimmy Fallon played footage from Robin’s first appearance with Johnny Carson, then stood on his desk and declared, “O Captain, my Captain. You will be missed.”
Locations that had featured prominently in Robin’s life were turned into makeshift shrines, where fans left flowers, candles, and farewell messages: at his home in Tiburon, at the house in San Francisco where he had filmed Mrs. Doubtfire, at his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at the bench in Boston’s Public Garden where he and Matt Damon had opened up to each other in Good Will Hunting, even at the old Queen Anne mansion in Boulder that had been used for exterior shots on Mork & Mindy. Social media and Twitter, especially, were blanketed with posts that reflected the heartache and confusion felt by the population at large, as people felt compelled to recite favorite quotations from Robin’s performances or give thanks for what his work had meant to them. His suicide seemed to cast everything he had done previously in a newly foreboding light; the serious roles were suddenly more urgent and the comic roles were now irreparably tinged with melancholy. As the film critic Bilge Ebiri tweeted with uncommon precision that day, “You start off as a kid seeing Robin Williams as a funny man. You come of age realizing many of his roles are about keeping darkness at bay.”
While many celebrities posted about their favorite memories of Robin or shared pictures of themselves with him, other friends shunned this strangely performative aspect of the modern-day mourning ritual. Knowing that many people expected to hear from him, Billy Crystal simply tweeted, “No words.”
Crystal and his wife, Janice, had been just a few days into what was meant to be a month-long European vacation when they got the call from David Steinberg, who was Crystal’s manager as well as Robin’s, telling them that Robin had taken his own life. Immediately, the couple canceled the rest of their trip and prepared to return home to mourn their friend. As they passed through the airport in Rome, Crystal was struck by the tableau presented by the international newsstands, where every cover of every publication bore a picture of Robin’s face. “For that moment,” Crystal said, “there was no war in Iraq or Afghanistan. There were no terrorist threats. There was no trouble in the world, except that Robin had died. Every paper, everywhere, the front page. He was a joyous spirit that people loved and trusted. It didn’t make sense.”
Among the most widely circulated images posted on social media that day was a bittersweet one of Aladdin embracing the Genie, with the caption “Genie, you’re free”; the picture was from the final scene of that Disney movie, when Aladdin has used his final wish to release the Genie from his servitude in the lamp and the magical shape-shifter takes off into the sky. A version of this tweet posted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was seen online an estimated sixty-nine million times, and though it was simply as a tribute and farewell to an Oscar-winning actor, it seemed to strike the wrong tone—as if Robin’s body, if not his very life, was a prison he needed to escape from and suicide the means for his emancipation.
Even as Robin’s own friends eulogized him that day, some of them found themselves brimming with a frustration and disbelief for which they could not quite find a place. As the comedian Steven Pearl later said, “I don’t count his death as a suicide, because it wasn’t him that did it, as far as I’m concerned. It just really angered me that that would happen to someone like him. Why couldn’t this happen to an asshole? I know plenty of those. It was like John Lennon getting killed again, except this time we knew John. Come on, Robin. You’re supposed to die when I was in my eighties, you son of a bitch.”
Steven Haft, who produced Dead Poets Society and Jakob the Liar, was among those who felt certain that, no matter how much agony Robin was in, he would never have knowingly inflicted such pain on his own children. �
�I don’t, to this day, believe he intended to never see his children again,” he said.
On Tuesday evening, August 12, Robin’s children made their first public remarks, in three individual statements. Zak wrote, “I would ask those that loved him to remember him by being as gentle, kind, and generous as he would be. Seek to bring joy to the world as he sought.” Zelda poignantly joked, “To those he touched who are sending kind words, know that one of his favorite things in the world was to make you all laugh. As for those who are sending negativity, know that some small, giggling part of him is sending a flock of pigeons to your house to poop on your car. Right after you’ve had it washed. After all, he loved to laugh too.” Cody wrote, “I will miss him and take him with me everywhere I go for the rest of my life, and will look forward, forever, to the moment when I get to see him again.”
Marsha, who had not spoken to the press about Robin in years, released her own statement; it was brief but full of warmth, understanding, and sorrow. It read, in its entirety:
My heart is split wide open and scattered over the planet with all of you. Please remember the gentle, loving, generous—and yes, brilliant and funny—man that was Robin Williams. My arms are wrapped around our children as we attempt to grapple with celebrating the man we love, while dealing with this immeasurable loss.
By the time these statements were released to the news media, Robin’s body had already been cremated and, like his parents before him, his ashes had been scattered in the San Francisco Bay in a private ceremony earlier that day. There would be no gravestone or monument for Robin; as Zak would later say of him, “Only a passing of state has occurred. My father’s vastness is no longer contained in his body. But his soul, his being, is everywhere.”
Two more days passed, and in the absence of concrete information, speculation about the circumstances of Robin’s death grew wilder, more inaccurate, and more irresponsible: he was drunk or high when he died; he was flat broke and the walls were closing in; his suicide was a hoax and he was still alive; he was murdered.