Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  What these reports documented for the first time was the presence of a devastating brain disorder that likely accounted for much of what Robin had been experiencing in his final years, and which had never been fully diagnosed in his lifetime. Lewy body disease, a dementia believed to affect more than 1.3 million people in America—and far more men than women—results from a buildup of protein deposits in the brain. “There’s a protein that is normally useful in the brain, and it starts to accumulate abnormally, and it’s toxic,” said the neurologist Douglas Scharre of the Wexner Medical Center at Ohio State University. “Where it builds up it can cause cell loss and cell death, and therefore that contributes to certain conditions.”

  The onset of the disease is extremely gradual, Dr. Scharre explained: “The proteins build up very slowly. One day you’re normal. Then you’re having a little bit of motor problems, then little cognitive issues.” Those who suffer from it may first notice memory problems or physical stiffness, but over time they often undergo massive personality changes. They experience sleep problems and, in some cases, hallucinations; they may become increasingly physical, even violent; and their mental acuity can flicker on and off, like a light switch.

  “They’ll just shut down for an hour a day,” Dr. Scharre said. “They’re not asleep—they’re awake. They’re just staring off and not doing much. It’s not that they’re comatose or anything. But they sit there, and then all of a sudden, they’re back with it.”

  James E. Galvin, a neurologist from the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University, explained further: “People can appear drowsy or sleeping, have staring spells, think illogically and incoherently—and these episodes wax and wane, lasting seconds or minutes or hours. And they’re unpredictable.”

  The symptoms of Lewy body disease are distinct from those of other disorders. Unlike people with Alzheimer’s disease, who have difficulty forming memories, people with Lewy body disease can store memories but have difficulty retrieving them. Unlike Parkinson’s disease, which damages the motor-control portions of the brain, Lewy body disease goes on to attack parts of the brain that govern visual and spatial control as well as decision making.

  Though Robin may have been exhibiting some of the movement problems associated with Parkinson’s disease, Dr. Galvin said, “There was more going on, and that more made it suspicious, and that more was above and beyond Parkinson’s.”

  Because of these overlapping symptoms, though, patients are sometimes diagnosed with other conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, before Lewy body disease is properly identified. “I don’t fault physicians for misdiagnosing it,” Dr. Galvin said. “It’s not that easy.”

  Certain drugs, including medications prescribed for Parkinson’s, can help treat some of the symptoms associated with Lewy body disease, such as the movement problems, aberrant behaviors, and sleep disruptions. “The medications help a little bit, but not a whole lot,” Dr. Scharre said. “We give them in low doses, but if you go up higher, more often they’re going to get side effects, because it causes increased hallucinations if you already have that.”

  Ultimately, the dementia itself is aggressive, irreversible, and incurable. “There’s no way to repair the damage that’s been done,” Dr. Galvin said. “All you’re doing is slowing down the symptoms’ progression without changing the underlying disease.”

  He added, “If you give someone a wrong diagnosis, the family has no ability to plan.”

  It is also a disease with an associated risk of suicide, particularly when patients are younger and before its most severe effects have set in. “If you’re young, if you have insight into what’s happening, and you have some of the associated symptoms—like depression and the hallucinations,” said Edward Huey, a neuropsychiatrist at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. “That’s when we think the risk of suicide is highest.”

  In Robin’s case, Dr. Galvin said, a complete and precise diagnosis can never be obtained, because it was not completed while he was alive. “If we could look through the retrospect-o-scope, we might say, ‘Oh, sure, that’s Lewy body disease.’ He may have eventually been diagnosed with it. At the time he was presenting symptoms that might have looked like Parkinson’s and that’s what they were diagnosing. Over time, it probably would have been more refined.”

  Still, these new findings about Robin’s condition seemed to fill in some of the most perplexing gaps surrounding his death, and they were rapidly embraced by many of his friends and loved ones. “It was not depression that killed Robin,” Susan would later say. “Depression was one of let’s call it fifty symptoms and it was a small one.” The disease that her husband had been facing, she said, “was faster than us and bigger than us.… one of the doctors said, ‘Robin was very aware that he was losing his mind and there was nothing he could do about it.’”

  Eric Idle mourned him as a man “misdiagnosed with Parkinsons” and “an undiagnosed victim of dementia with Lewy bodies,” and Bobcat Goldthwait reaffirmed the findings of the autopsy, while ruefully acknowledging the many other hypotheses that had taken hold in the public’s imagination and become part of Robin’s mythology. “He died from Lewy body dementia,” Goldthwait said, “but the world wants it to be about something else, depression, drugs, career, relationships, etc. He had a disease that attacked his brain.

  “My own opinion is that that’s what actually changed his perception of reality,” he said.

  But other friends saw a cold, conscious deliberation at work in Robin’s final actions. As Billy Crystal explained, “I put myself in his place. Think of it this way: the speed at which the comedy came is the speed at which the terrors came. And all that they described that can happen with this psychosis, if that’s the right word—the hallucinations, the images, the terror—coming at the speed his comedy came at, maybe even faster, I can’t imagine living like that.”

  Thinking back to their conversations after Robin was told he had Parkinson’s disease, Crystal said, “He did ask me a lot of questions about Muhammad Ali. ‘When did he start to get bad?’ ‘When did he go silent?’ ‘When did this happen?’ He was seeing himself. This was where I’m going to be. I don’t think he could live with that.”

  Crystal added, “My heart breaks that he suffered and only saw one way out.”

  The coroner’s findings raised a new mystery about Robin’s final hours. Was he cognizant of who he was, and was he aware of what he was doing when he committed suicide? Or could he have been in the grip of a dissociative state brought on by his disease when he took his own life? The official reports held no answers to these questions, and perhaps they were impossible to solve. In the past, Robin’s family had put out press releases sharing the information they had, only to see these public statements fuel high-flown and romanticized conjectures about him. This time, they made no comment about the new findings, neither advocating for what they knew to be true nor dispelling what they believed might have been false.

  For a year-end edition of Entertainment Weekly, Billy Crystal contributed a short comic screenplay imagining Robin’s arrival in heaven. Set in a celestial nightclub called the Big Room, the script envisioned Robin’s entrance accompanied by a Don Pardo voice-over and an angelic ovation; he riffs on iconic audience members like Abraham Lincoln and Anne Frank (“is it true that being Jews, on Sunday nights you would get Chinese food … takeout?”), reunites with deceased mentors like Jonathan Winters and Richard Pryor, and meets his hero Albert Einstein. (“Al, wanna know my theory of relativity? Never lend relatives money ’cause you won’t get it back.”) The scene ends with Robin receiving pats on the back from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, nods of acknowledgment from George Burns and Groucho Marx, a blown kiss from Gilda Radner, and a respectful derby tip from Charlie Chaplin. “WE PUSH IN ON ROBIN,” the stage directions say. “HE SEEMS AT PEACE … HE SMILES … FADE OUT.”

  It was a sweet and sentimental flight of fancy, as much a reflection of Crystal’s ribald se
nse of humor as of Robin’s, and the storybook ending that anyone would wish for a fallen hero of comedy. But regardless of its author and his good intentions, it was just another fantasy, and it did not reflect starker realities back on earth.

  On the afternoon of December 19, 2014, the Friday before Christmas, Susan’s lawyers filed a petition in San Francisco Superior Court, asking for a judge to interpret what they said were ambiguities in the rules governing Robin’s estate. In 1989, amid his divorce from Valerie, Robin had created a financial trust to ensure that, in the event of his death, she would continue to receive alimony and child support payments; once his financial obligations to Valerie were met, the trust was updated to make Zak its beneficiary, and, during Robin’s divorce from Marsha, it was updated to make further provisions for Zelda and Cody.

  About a month before he married Susan in 2011, Robin had entered into a prenuptial agreement with her, and in 2012 he signed a brief legal document, known as a pour-over will, that would leave his estate to his trust, which was operated by his attorneys. Robin also created a separate trust specifically for Susan, which left her their home in Tiburon, valued at about $7 million, as well as its contents, and enough cash or property to cover, for her lifetime, “all costs related to the residence.” However, the terms of his trust specified property that was to go to his three children, including all of Robin’s “clothing, jewelry, personal photos taken prior to his marriage to Susan,” as well as Robin’s “memorabilia and awards in the entertainment industry and the tangible personal property” at his Napa ranch.

  In their petition, Susan’s lawyers outlined troubling claims, alleging that just days after Robin’s death, “the co-Trustees, through their agents, unilaterally removed Mr. Williams’s personal property and asked for permission from Mrs. Williams after the fact.”

  The trustees, it said, “insisted on gaining access to Mrs. Williams’s home for the purpose of dividing and removing property under the specific gifts of the Trust,” noting that the trustees had keys to the house. “Naturally, Mrs. Williams became frightened of the co-Trustees invading her home (where she and her two teen-age sons reside).” It was at this point that Susan hired lawyers of her own, and, in retaliation, the petition suggested, “certain home-related services were canceled.”

  Susan’s lawyers said that Robin’s trust instructions were ambiguous about what constituted jewelry; whether he meant memorabilia specifically related to his entertainment career or accumulated over his lifetime; what was memorabilia or home contents; and what should be done with property from the Tiburon house that he kept at the Napa ranch.

  Susan acknowledged in the filing that she had no claim to possessions like the suspenders Robin wore on Mork & Mindy, because they are “related to Mr. Williams’s acting career in the entertainment industry.” But she said that she should be entitled to other personal items, like the ring and the tuxedo that he wore at their wedding, as well as “Mr. Williams’s personal collections of knickknacks and other items that are not associated with his famous persona.”

  There were issues, too, with the reserve fund intended for Susan so she could cover the costs of the Tiburon house. As the petition put it, “The co-Trustees have taken a restrictive interpretation of this provision, despite the broad phrasing of the Trust terms.”

  That, at least, was how Susan had characterized her recent interactions with Robin’s children and the executors of his estate. But Zak, Zelda, and Cody naturally saw things very differently, and about a month later, they filed a court document of their own. In emotionally charged terms, they objected to Susan’s petition, and they characterized her as an interloper who was trying to exploit a legal process to gain herself even more than Robin had already promised her.

  Their legal filing, dated January 21, 2015, stated that they were “heartbroken” that Susan, “Mr. Williams’ wife of less than three years, has acted against his wishes by challenging the plans he so carefully made for his estate. While it is styled as a request for instruction, the Petition in fact appears to be a blatant attempt to alter the disposition of assets Mr. Williams specifically planned and provided for under the terms of the Trust Agreement.”

  And whatever else Susan might seek to claim from Robin’s estate, whether property or money, it came from the share the children were already promised, their filing said, “in a way that would prevent them from receiving what their father wanted them to receive.”

  Contrary to Susan’s claim that the trustees of Robin’s estate had intimidated her by suggesting that they would be coming into her home to remove trust property, the Williams children said that the trustees had been denied access to the Tiburon residence for nearly three months, even while she had possessions appraised and conducted a $30,000 renovation of the house. At the time of the filing, they said, “more than five months after their father’s death, the Williams Children have not been allowed any access to their father’s personal effects in the Tiburon Residence, including family photos, that Mr. Williams clearly intended for his children.”

  Particularly galling to Zak, Zelda, and Cody was an ill-considered turn of phrase in Susan’s petition that described Robin’s vast holdings of collectibles and mementos as “collections of knickknacks.” It was a misstatement they seized upon to show how, in their estimation, Susan had never truly understood their father, and they rebutted it at length in their filing, which said:

  it is important to recognize that Mr. Williams was an avid collector of various items of personal, cultural, or historical interest, including, but not limited to: toys, including but not limited to Japanese anime figurines; watches; rings; pendant necklaces; pendants, brooches and lapel pins; carved figurines, including but not limited to Netsuke figurines; carved boxes; theater masks; rare, first edition and autographed books and related materials; graphic novels; record albums; bicycles; walking sticks; Native American articles; models; movie posters; sports-related memorabilia; Middle East tour-related memorabilia, including but [not] limited to flags and coins; antique and unique weapons, including but not limited to knives; mineral specimens and fossils; and skulls.… These collections were carefully amassed by Mr. Williams over his lifetime and were precious to him. As the Williams Children grew, so did their father’s collections and they shared in their father’s excitement as additions were made to his collections.

  As far as Susan’s contention that she might need more money than the trust instructions promised her to pay for the upkeep of the house, the children’s legal filing said: “It is telling indeed that Petitioner appears to be arguing for additional funds for her trust before her trust has even been funded.”

  The details of the legal dispute soon spilled out into the press, and as further arguments were waged in the court of public opinion, they turned ugly at times. Jim Wagstaffe, one of Susan’s lawyers, said that his client was “not somebody who has any sticky fingers,” while he castigated Robin’s children for the wealth they inherited at his death. “Mr. Williams wanted his wife to be able to stay in her home and not be disrupted in her life with her children,” Wagstaffe said. “Compared to what the Williams children were set to receive from their father, this is a bucket of water in a lake.”

  These blistering legal exchanges triggered a sensitive fault line on the boundary between Robin’s children, who were close-knit and had experienced many years of thick and thin together, and Susan, who was still very much a newcomer to a complicated family. The children were fundamentally private people who wanted no special treatment because of who their father was; Susan had known Robin as a celebrity first. They had all been competing for the limited resource of Robin’s attention, and now there was no more of it to give. The man who had bridged the gulf between these camps was gone now, and though there was no way of knowing where he would have stood in this dispute, the very notion of it surely would have made him uncomfortable. “One thing Robin didn’t like is, he didn’t like conflict, and he wanted people to genuinely be happy,” Bobcat Goldthwait sa
id. “He really wanted everybody to be happy.”

  For some of Robin’s friends and colleagues, the estate dispute reinforced for them a long-standing discomfort they had felt about Susan, and whether she fully shared the values of her husband and his family on the proper applications of wealth and celebrity. From the moment she was first introduced to Robin’s children, in the days before his open-heart surgery, there were concerns about how smoothly she meshed with the rest of the family—whether she respected Robin’s relationships with Zak, Zelda, and Cody, as well as with their mothers, Valerie and Marsha. When Susan decided to pursue the matter in court, they felt their suspicions had been justified.

  “I think she just wanted to secure her place as Mrs. Williams—the final Mrs. Williams,” said Cheri Minns, Robin’s makeup artist. “And to always be that. I can’t see that. And none of it really matters. Because he’s gone.”

  The producer Steven Haft echoed the sentiment that while Susan was entitled to share in the grief and sadness that the other members of the family felt, she had overstepped her bounds. “It’s interesting when I hear Susan described as the widow Williams,” he said. “There are only three people on the planet who can be described as the widow Williams, and Susan isn’t one of them. There’s Marsha. There’s Billy. And there’s David [Steinberg, Robin’s manager]. I have not heard accounts by which Susan deserves the accolade.”