Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  On Thursday, seemingly in response to no particular report or allegation, Susan put out another statement to the press. It read:

  Robin spent so much of his life helping others. Whether he was entertaining millions on stage, film or television, our troops on the frontlines, or comforting a sick child—Robin wanted us to laugh and to feel less afraid.

  Since his passing, all of us who loved Robin have found some solace in the tremendous outpouring of affection and admiration for him from the millions of people whose lives he touched. His greatest legacy, besides his three children, is the joy and happiness he offered to others, particularly to those fighting personal battles.

  Robin’s sobriety was intact and he was brave as he struggled with his own battles of depression, anxiety as well as early stages of Parkinson’s Disease, which he was not yet ready to share publicly.

  It is our hope in the wake of Robin’s tragic passing, that others will find the strength to seek the care and support they need to treat whatever battles they are facing so they may feel less afraid.

  It was the first time anyone outside of Robin’s innermost circle had disclosed his Parkinson’s diagnosis with the wider world, and Susan’s statement appeared to bring clarity to the cloudiest of questions surrounding his death. If it was difficult to countenance the idea of Robin killing himself over financial worries or persistent depression, it became somewhat more comprehensible in the face of a degenerative disease that, even with treatment, would gradually shut down his body and his mind. Horrible as his choice was, at least now it seemed it could be framed as a decision between immediate, terminal pain and an untold lifetime of further torment.

  Two weeks later, Robin was singled out for a special acknowledgment at the Emmy Awards, at the end of the show’s annual In Memoriam montage. After the pop musician Sara Bareilles sang a somber version of “Smile,” Billy Crystal took the stage and shared some favorite anecdotes about his friend: sitting in a broadcast booth at Shea Stadium with Tim McCarver and Robin, who knew nothing about baseball, but suddenly perked up and slipped into character when Crystal suggested, “You know, Tim, we have a great Russian baseball player with us”; or bonding with Crystal’s older, immigrant relatives at family events by pretending he had recently arrived in America from a little shtetl in Poland.

  Dropping any remaining layer of shtick or irony, Crystal continued with an earnestness he did not often put forward in his performances. “For almost forty years,” he said, “he was the brightest star in a comedy galaxy. But while some of the brightest of our celestial bodies are actually extinct now, their energy long since cooled, but miraculously, because they float in the heavens, so far away from us now, their beautiful light will continue to shine on us forever. And the glow will be so bright, it’ll warm your heart, it’ll make your eyes glisten, and you’ll think to yourself: Robin Williams, what a concept.”

  A selection of Robin’s TV appearances followed, ending on a bit from An Evening at the Met about the inquisitive, innocently foulmouthed three-year-old Zak, and Robin telling his young son he did not always have the answers to life’s questions. “But maybe along the way,” Robin says, “you take my hand, tell a few jokes and have some fun.… Come on, pal. You’re not afraid, are you?” In his child’s falsetto he answers himself: “Nah.” The final punch line—Zak saying “Fuck it”—could not be aired on network television, so the montage concluded with Robin walking off the Metropolitan Opera stage into darkness, his left hand extended into the air as if holding on to some bigger, invisible figure.

  The tribute had been difficult for Crystal to compose, coming so soon after Robin’s death, when many of the details were still shrouded in mystery. “It would have been easier if he’d had a heart attack and died,” Crystal said. “But the fact that it happened the way it happened, there were so many unanswered questions and these terrible assumptions: he must have been drinking, it must have been drugs. Nobody knew, including myself. I would sit down to write something—‘This sounds like shit’—how can I make it funny and personal, and put him in a perspective that I thought would represent who he was and would always be?”

  Crystal had cried his way through a dress rehearsal the day before the Emmy broadcast, and on the night of the ceremony he wept in the arms of Jay Leno, who was waiting for him in the wings when he finished his delivery. Yet in other moments he felt an inexplicable sense of serenity. Every morning since he had returned home after Robin’s death, Crystal had noticed a small green and yellow bird waiting at his window, trying to get his attention by tapping at the glass with its prominent beak or by flying up and hovering ostentatiously. “It keeps pecking at the window and it wouldn’t fly away,” Crystal said. “It wasn’t scared. And I’d hit the window back and it would do it back to me, and then it would fly up and land on this little leaf. Over and over again. It’s weird.”

  With its familiar physical features and show-off tendencies—not to mention the fact that his best friend had shared his name with a bird—Crystal could only arrive at one explanation for this avian attention-seeker. “Jews have this belief when someone dies,” he explained. “The thought is that they have thirty days before the soul settles in heaven. I definitely felt it when my mom died. You feel a presence, whether it’s there or not, and then you feel it go.” Using his phone, Crystal recorded a video of the bird and showed it to Robin’s son Cody. “I didn’t say anything,” Crystal recalled, “and Cody looked at it and said, ‘Oh, that’s my dad.’”

  On September 27, hundreds of Robin’s friends and colleagues gathered at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco for a memorial service. The event was not open to the public or broadcast in any form, affording some intimacy for guest speakers who hoped their words, offered haltingly and through tears, could conjure Robin one last time and bring some resolution to an otherwise unfinished life. On the back of the program was an illustration of a hummingbird, similar to the one that had adorned the invitation to Robin’s sixtieth birthday party, only this one was clad in a suit of armor; inside the pamphlet, opposite the list of speakers, was an inspirational quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

  To laugh often and much;

  to win the respect of intelligent people

  and the affection of children;

  to earn the appreciation of honest critics

  and endure the betrayal of false friends;

  to appreciate beauty;

  to find the best in others;

  to leave the world a bit better

  whether by a healthy child,

  a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition;

  to know even one life has breathed easier

  because you lived here.

  This is to have succeeded.

  Following an opening invocation by the Reverend Cecil Williams and a medley of soul and R & B songs performed by the Glide Memorial Choir & Change Band, the first speaker of the day was, of course, Billy Crystal. He shared familiar stories about Robin calling him on the day of Reagan’s funeral to impersonate the late president (“that would explain why I’m in a hot tub with Joe Stalin and Nixon’s balls are resting on the bridge of my nose”) and his being reprimanded at a Comic Relief event by the Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, after which, Crystal said, “He whispers in my ear: ‘No way this motherfucker wins.’”

  It was only in their phone conversations of the past few years that he and Robin were truly opening up to each other, Crystal said, and “you can only do that with someone that you totally trust. And isn’t that really the measure of a friend? That he not only rejoices in your success but is there with a shoulder to cry on, when things get a little—as he called it—crispy? I’m sorry, folks. I’m a little lost without him.”

  Robin always dared to go further than his peers, Crystal said: “He was so fucking brave, and I loved that about him, and I always will.” In one of their philosophical conversations about the nature of comedy, Robin explained to him that it was like eating a lobster: “You keep cr
ushing stuff and then, hey, there’s something sweet where you didn’t expect it to be. That was our dear friend. I’ll miss him always.”

  Bobcat Goldthwait spoke next, observing how, after Robin’s death, a portion of his dialogue from World’s Greatest Dad had become an Internet meme. Reciting the line, he said: “I used to think the worst thing in life is ending up all alone. It isn’t. The worst thing in life is ending up with people that make you feel all alone.” As Goldthwait now explained, “That was just a movie. That couldn’t be farther from the truth in regards to Robin. You loved Robin and he loved you.”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Goldthwait said, “but something happened to Robin a few years back. Again, I am not a doctor. But something affected his brain.”

  More remembrances followed, from Bing Gordon, the venture capitalist and an executive at the video game publisher Electronic Arts; Bonnie Hunt, Robin’s Jumanji costar; and his assistant, Rebecca Erwin Spencer.

  When it was her turn to speak, Susan tried to sum up what her handful of years together with Robin had meant to her.

  “Robin was not alone as he waged war against the mounting offenses of depression, anxiety and Parkinson’s,” she said. “With trusted companions and professional help he pressed on. I am so proud of how very hard he worked at gaining ground on the physical, mental, emotional and personal pressures he faced. Spiritually, he was gaining ground, too. But he had so very much to overcome.”

  Neither Valerie nor Marsha spoke during the ceremony.

  Eric Idle, who said he was too overwhelmed to write a proper speech, instead performed a short, Monty Python–esque song in Robin’s honor, affectionate and humorous with a tinge of exasperation that he did not try to hide. Its lyrics ran, in part:

  Good night, Robin

  It’s hateful that you’ve gone

  But we’re grateful

  for that fateful

  day you came along

  Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talked about Robin’s participation in the USO tours, and Mort Sahl looked back on the friendship he had shared with Robin since he’d moved back to Mill Valley. Then an emotional Whoopi Goldberg reflected on how Robin, as well as Crystal, had treated her like a peer and had given her the space to be herself as they bonded together on the Comic Relief project.

  She got choked up as she recounted how Robin would phone her up, unexpectedly, even in periods when she was going through divorces, hoping that she would find happiness, companionship, and contentment. “Now, Robin would call me out of the blue,” she said. “‘Are you married?’ No, I’d say, no, I’m not going to do it again. ‘Are you gay?’ I’d say, No no no. He said, ‘But you’re all right?’ I’d say, yeah, I’m all right, man.” Robin, she said, “spoke to me when nobody else would.”

  The final speakers of the day were Robin’s children, who took the stage together and at times held each other’s hands and hugged one another for support. Cody was the first to talk; he was the youngest, at twenty-two, and the least public of the three, but his oration was articulate and powerful. He spoke of having trouble sleeping from the time he was very young and how his father would try to soothe his insomnia with comic books and science magazines. “He would read me articles about space, robots, nuclear bombs, but they might as well have been fairy tales,” Cody said. “I would drift into a universe of dreams and he was the captain of the ship.… He gave my imagination rocket fuel, as he did for so many other people.”

  He compared Robin’s laughter to “a volcano eruption” and described his bright blue eyes as being “like the eyes of a child, his eyes were full of love, curiosity, and bewilderment. Those eyes saw a world which, in many places, had plummeted into darkness, and they made the child in him sad and longing. The man that he was would help anyone and anybody he could. Bottom line. His body would go through the motions and he would rev himself up, and unleash on people, and they would laugh and cry and look at each other. It meant the world to them, and to him as well.”

  More ruefully, Cody acknowledged that Robin had not always been available to him as he was growing up. “I always wished he would belong more to our family than he did to the world,” he said. “But that’s a selfish notion, I realize. Folks like him don’t just grow on trees. It was only fair for us to share. Everybody deserves to laugh so hard it hurts, and everybody deserves his fairy tales.” Speaking directly to his father, he said, “Please rest up, and when you’re done resting, go explore a hundred different utopias whose doors were locked until now. Traverse a million different realities and make everyone laugh so hard that their cheeks hurt along the way. I will carry your heart and your dream with me always.”

  Next was Zelda, who reflected on all the experiences that she and her father would never get to share. “There are only two things I am actually sad that he will miss,” she said. “One, that he will not get to walk me down the aisle and make a completely inappropriate speech at my wedding. And two, like he did with my little brother, that he will not get to teach his future grandchildren inappropriate jokes that get them sent to the principal’s office. I guess showing them his stand-up too young will have to do.”

  She closed with a quotation from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, just before the title character—a wandering, innocent space traveler—allows himself to be bitten by a poisonous snake. A portion of it read:

  In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night.… You—only you—will have stars that can laugh!

  Zak came last of all, and like his half sister and half brother, he spoke tenderly and honestly about his father, but without romance or illusion. “There’s Robin Williams the concept, and then there’s Robin Williams the man,” Zak began.

  I’d like to speak about the man. The beautiful, generous, troubled, wonderful, dear man that I am infinitely proud to call my father. Eater of cold chicken breast, drinker of espresso, lover of bumper stickers. I’d like to speak about the man who was a paradox. The alien. I feel the overwhelming joy he brought millions, and I felt his abject loneliness. He was at once so superhuman and yet so very human. But I don’t think he ever felt he was anything special. I can’t tell you how many times I just wanted to embrace him and say, “Dad, it’s okay. Everything’s going to be okay.” And when I’d say that, he would look at me and smile and say, “I know.”

  On what would be their final morning together, Zak recalled, “I said to him, ‘Dad, everything’s going to be okay.’ And he said to me, ‘I know.’ I’ll never see him again. But I do know that he said what he meant. Everything will be okay.”

  Another month later, on October 26, before Game 5 of the 2014 World Series, Zak, Zelda, and Cody strode onto the field at AT&T Park in San Francisco, dressed in San Francisco Giants baseball caps and jerseys. While Zelda and Cody stood at the edge of the pitcher’s mound, their arms around each other, Zak stepped onto the rubber and began practicing his windup. Waiting at home plate was Billy Crystal, who caught the ceremonial first pitch that Zak threw to him; then, supported by the cheers of some forty-three thousand baseball fans, the four of them hugged and walked off the field together.

  Crystal later recalled the scene as one of the first few instances of pleasure that he and Robin’s children had been allowed to experience following Robin’s death. “If Robin could have been there for that, I’d have told him, ‘Hey, listen, Zak threw the pitch—and I caught it,” Crystal said with mock haughtiness. “I think he would have found an incredible joy in that. I didn’t let myself get sad that day.” Describing one of his favorite qualities about his friend—a huge, eruptive cackle that Robin would let out when he was especially tickled—Crystal said, “I could hear that Pavarotti laugh.”

  As they savored the moment, Zak, Zelda, and Cody seemed happy, healing, and ready to move forward. But Robin’s story wasn’t over yet, and neither was theirs.

  21<
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  THE BIG ROOM

  Death was supposed to have settled many of the questions that Robin’s life could not. The paradox of the man who was both wildly outgoing and painfully introverted, at home in a crowd of strangers and desperately alone with the people he knew best, had finally been resolved. Behind the facade, this was a man who was suffering terrible pain, and whose long-standing fears about the erosion of his career and the decay of his body had come to pass simultaneously. Now it seemed that he had taken his own life in a moment of maximum desolation, almost surely to spare himself the punishment of having to stand by as a spectator while his once agile frame turned against him and calcified into a prison for his singularly inventive mind. If anything positive or constructive had occurred in the aftermath of his death, it had, at least, brought sensitive issues of depression and mental health to the forefront and united Robin’s family in an effort to heal and move beyond their devastating loss.

  But there was still much more that no one knew.

  In November 2014, three months after Robin died, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office released his autopsy protocol, a report enumerating all the factors that had contributed to his death. The first category on this list was designated “Hanging,” with twenty-five descriptive subentries (“Asphyxia, minutes,” “Belt ligature encircling the neck,” “Ligature mark with slight furrow of the neck,” and so on). The second category was “Incised wounds of left wrist”; the third, “Healing abrasion, right arm”; and the fourth, “Hypertensive, atherosclerotic and valvular cardiovascular disease.” Then, there was a fifth category, “Neuropathological diagnoses,” whose first subentry read: “Diffuse Lewy body dementia (DLBD, aka diffuse Lewy body disease).”

  A separate surgical pathology report, which had been prepared over the previous days and which analyzed portions of Robin’s brain tissue that had been preserved before his cremation, expanded on this assessment. Its summary read, “These neuropathologic findings in this case support the diagnosis of Lewy body dementia (aka diffuse Lewy body disease or DLBD) using the most recent guidelines established by the National Institute on Aging/Alzheimer’s Disease Association.… It is important to note that patients with diffuse Lewy body dementia frequently present with Parkinsonian motor symptoms and a constellations [sic] of neuropsychiatric manifestations, including depression and hallucination.”