Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Even Robin’s children could not completely deny the frustration they felt. “Susan was under the impression that she had struck gold,” Zak said of her. “But for us, we’re deeply involved with Dad’s life. You can’t untether us from the equation. I think that was a little unexpected.”

  Going forward, the children sought to portray themselves as having come to terms with their father’s death, past any anger and accepting the reality of his absence. As Zelda explained, “A lot of people who have been through it and lost someone—the ones that I’ve found who have gone on to lead very full lives—found that they just had to know that there’s no point questioning it, and there’s no point blaming everyone else for it, and there’s no point blaming yourself or the world or whatever the case may be,” she said. “Because it happened, so you have to continue to move and you have to continue to live and manage.”

  When asked what had driven her father to take his own life, she answered, “It’s not important to ask.”

  It was not until October 2015 that Susan and Robin’s children reached a settlement in their standoff. The children kept the vast quantity of their father’s personal items, including more than fifty bicycles and eighty-five watches, and his collection of toy soldiers, as well as possessions like Robin’s Academy Award statuette for Good Will Hunting, which was never in dispute. Susan was allowed to hold on to possessions that had emotional value for her, including their wedding gifts, a favorite watch of Robin’s, and a bicycle they had bought on their honeymoon in Paris. She was also permitted to continue to receive funds for the Tiburon house, in which she would be allowed to stay for the rest of her life.

  “While it’s hard to speak of this as a win, given it stems from the greatest loss of all, I am deeply grateful to the judge for helping resolve these issues,” Susan said in a statement at the time. “I can live in peace knowing that my husband’s wishes were honored,” she continued. “I feel like Robin’s voice has been heard and I can finally grieve in the home we shared together.”

  The Williams children, through their spokesman, said that “in keeping with their father’s desire for privacy, they would not be making any public statements about the case.”

  With nothing binding them anymore, the two factions of Robin’s family moved off in different directions. Susan began to speak out publicly about the last months of Robin’s life and the circumstances that preceded his suicide; over the span of a few weeks in November, she gave interviews to ABC News (which were shown on Good Morning America, World News Tonight, Nightline, and The View) and to People magazine; she also contributed an essay to the Times of London. These recollections were told only from her perspective and did not infringe on anyone else’s memories of Robin, and though each interview essentially focused on the same set of events—their meeting at the Apple store, their wedding, the onset of Robin’s health problems, his Parkinson’s diagnosis—it was far more than anyone in the Williams family had said about his decline and death.

  In March 2016, the California Department of Transportation officially renamed the tunnel that connects Marin County to the Golden Gate Bridge in Robin’s honor; locals had already been referring to it as the Robin Williams Tunnel for many years, because its arching entries and exits were painted with rainbows, evoking the colorful hues of the suspenders he wore on Mork & Mindy. In October, the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, operated by the labor union that represents professional film and television actors, christened its Robin Williams Center in New York, an educational space and theater. The space was opened with a gala ceremony where the guests included Zak and Zelda, Billy and Janice Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg. Susan did not attend the event.

  That fall, Susan gave another round of interviews about the end of Robin’s life, including an appearance on CBS This Morning and an essay in the scientific journal Neurology that carried the provocative title “The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain.” Susan, who had joined the board of directors for the American Brain Foundation, a professional association of scientists and doctors, concluded her essay with a direct appeal to the medical experts she trusted would be reading her contribution. “Hopefully from this sharing of our experience you will be inspired to turn Robin’s suffering into something meaningful through your work and wisdom,” she wrote. “It is my belief that when healing comes out of Robin’s experience, he will not have battled and died in vain.”

  Among the provisions of Robin’s trust that were revealed in the legal dispute between Susan and his children was a curious stipulation that read as follows:

  All ownership interest in the right to Settlor’s name, voice, signature, photograph, likeness and right of privacy/publicity (sometimes referred to as “right of publicity”) to the Windfall Foundation, a California Nonprofit Corporation … subject to the restriction that such right of publicity shall not be exploited for a twenty-five (25) year period commencing on the date of Settlor’s death.

  What this meant in plain English was that Robin had bequeathed all of his distinguishing qualities—what he looked like; what he sounded like; his signature; his name—to a charitable organization, set up by his attorneys, which would not be allowed to profit off them in any form for twenty-five years. It was an unusually forward-thinking way to contemplate how technology and entertainment might evolve over the next quarter century, optimistic and dystopian in equal proportions. There could be no new movies, TV shows, or advertisements in which he could appear or be digitally inserted; no new stand-up routines that could be created from his voice; no holograms or other as-yet undreamt-of media in which some simulacrum of him could be conjured up and made to perform his best-loved roles and routines—at least not before the year 2039. Until then, the human race would have to be satisfied with the finite amount of Robin Williams content he had produced while he was alive.

  Aside from his animated features like Aladdin and the Night at the Museum franchise, Robin had never made a sequel to any of his movies; with the exceptions of those films and his television series, he had never played the same character more than once—as much as his critics loved to accuse him of playing the same character every single time. To date, none of his live-action movies or TV shows have been remade without him. A stage adaptation of Dead Poets Society, starring the comic actor Jason Sudeikis as Mr. Keating, opened to tepid reviews at an off-Broadway theater in New York in the fall of 2016. When Sony Pictures announced a few months earlier that it was producing a sequel to Jumanji starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, the resulting outrage from fans who felt that Robin’s memory had been disrespected was so great that Johnson had to assure the public, “You have my word, we will honor his name and the character of ‘Alan Parrish’ will stand alone and be forever immortalized in the world of Jumanji in an earnest and cool way. I have an idea of what to do and I think his family will be proud. I also think Robin is somewhere lookin’ down and laughing.”

  For all the different strands of culture that Robin had tied together in his work, and all the people he drew from and celebrated as his influences, there was no actor or comedian who could be considered his protégé or his heir, no performer who tried to do what he did the way he did it. He had admirers but no imitators; no one combined the precise set of talents he had in the same alchemical proportions. Maybe they had the intellect, but not the sheer enthusiasm for the variety that the world could offer; the speed, but not the supernatural ability to invent and surprise; the wonderment, but never the purity of heart that came from a genuine empathy for his fellow man. Robin Williams was once in a lifetime, and his lifetime was now very much over.

  EPILOGUE

  One Saturday morning in the fall of 2009, Robin Williams called me at my home in New York and asked if I’d like to go shopping for comic books with him. We had been spending time together in the weeks prior for a profile I was writing about him for the New York Times, but he didn’t extend this particular invitation to generate material for that story. We had discovered earlier, one late night in Robin’s luxury
hotel room in uptown Atlanta after he’d finished that night’s set at the Fox Theatre, that we shared a mutual interest in comics and collectibles. When he mentioned that he’d be coming to New York on a break from the Weapons of Self Destruction tour and wanted to take me to one of his favorite comic-book shops when he visited, I thought it was the kind of thing a celebrity says during an interview to butter you up—an offhand pleasantry, with no real intention of following through. Only later did I learn that when Robin made this sort of offer, even to someone he knew only casually, it was a promise he meant to keep. He wasn’t trying to influence how I wrote about him and he didn’t expect anything more in return from me. If he could give you some of his time to help you enjoy your day or feel better about yourself, he would, and he gave pieces of himself to many people.

  Later that afternoon, we met outside Forbidden Planet, a well-stocked shop of geeky offerings in Union Square. Robin traveled by himself, with no entourage, security personnel, or even his assistant. He was dressed in casual clothes and didn’t seem to be trying to hide his identity from anyone, forgoing even a pair of sunglasses. The aisles were well populated with customers but he made his way through them freely, with the same excitement of a child who has been told that he can have anything he wants in the toy store. Robin spent the greatest portion of our time poring over a glass case full of expensive statuettes of militaristic robots and suggestively posed heroines. He wasn’t necessarily looking for new additions to his personal collection but to see how it measured up to the store’s display: “I’ve got that one at home,” he said absently, more to himself than me, as he meandered around the case. “Got that one. Got that.”

  Naturally, it was an unexpected sight for the employees and other shoppers at the store to see him standing just a few feet away, immersed in the same colorful mementos as they were. He was well past the peak of his career, but he was still Robin Williams, the man they’d seen in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society and all those comedy routines and, yes, Mork & Mindy. He had given performances that they had seen and loved and carried with them in their hearts. He was still one of the biggest stars in the entertainment industry, and now, even in a jaded city not much impressed by celebrity, people were astonished and a little bit intoxicated by his presence.

  As he turned a corner in the store, Robin nearly bumped into a middle-aged woman who hadn’t previously noticed him there. She had been gazing at the floor, and as she turned her attention upward to take in his smiling face, she realized who she was looking at, and she was flabbergasted.

  “It’s—it’s you,” she stammered out.

  Now it was Robin’s turn to glance downward and shuffle his feet in humility. “Yes it is,” he said softly. What else could he say?

  Robin still had this effect on people, even after having been in the public eye for decades. They could not believe that he was flesh and blood, like they were, and not just an image on a screen; the notion that he was someone who could be encountered and interacted with was almost too much to comprehend.

  This was how Robin had experienced every day of his life for more than thirty years. As much as he might want to, he could never be introduced to someone or make eye contact with a stranger without seeing that shock of recognition in their eyes; he couldn’t eliminate the barrier that went up when well-intentioned people wanted to give him special treatment. He could never know what it was like to lead what others considered to be a normal life and never see his own life as anything other than normal. Nor could he ever see himself as others saw him and take pride in the talents they easily recognized in him.

  I spoke to Robin for the first time several months earlier, when I was working on a story about Bobcat Goldthwait’s film World’s Greatest Dad. Robin and I talked over the phone, and his voice was serene and almost impossibly relaxed, betraying none of the trademarks of the hyperactive stand-up who would have swung from the chandeliers if he’d been allowed to. “I hear you’re going to come out and play with us,” he said, having given me permission to follow him for a few days later that year on the Weapons of Self Destruction tour, which he was preparing to restart after his heart surgery.

  I met him in that Atlanta hotel room, around midnight, after his Fox Theatre performance. As I would later write about that night, the mechanical key hidden in his back was winding down, and the flow of free associations and zany voices was slowing to a trickle. But he wanted to know as much about me as I did about him—my life, my career, how I’d met my wife—and when I finally got an opening to ask him about his upbringing and his mother, the dim lights in the room began to flicker. Robin played off the moment effortlessly: “Mama, mama, is that you?” he asked with mock trepidation. “What is it you wish to say? Speak more of this, O spirit!”

  Over the next several days I would see Robin in many different settings: performing for audiences of thousands of people who were just thrilled to see him alive, happy, and in good health; traveling from city to city in a cushy private plane; reflecting quietly on his recent personal difficulties—his divorce from Marsha, his relapse into alcoholism, his heart surgery—and on the challenges facing his stalled career and the recent loss of mentors like Richard Pryor.

  There was one part of Robin’s day that I was never allowed to see. When I arrived at the Fox Theatre that evening, prior to his performance, I was told that he was in his dressing room, by himself, immersed in his preshow ritual, and that he would be there for thirty to forty-five minutes. No one was permitted to interrupt him during this time. This was a pattern he repeated at each of the tour stops I followed him to, and I never found out what he did during these periods.

  Maybe he used this time to meditate, clear his mind, rehearse his lines, and burn off any remaining anxiety, or maybe he just wanted to create a mystique about himself and keep some portion of his creative process a secret, even as he gave away so much of who he was when he was onstage.

  I would see Robin or speak with him several more times in the following years, for articles about new projects he was working on or about people close to him; our final conversation was in the summer of 2013, about a year before he died, when I was writing a profile of Billy Crystal and he was working on what would be the only season of The Crazy Ones.

  Nearly everyone I have spoken to who knew Robin—and most knew him far better than I did—has described experiencing something akin to what I felt when I wasn’t allowed into his dressing room. They believed there was some part of himself that he withheld from them; everyone got a piece of him and a fortunate few got quite a lot of him, but no one got all of him.

  Only Robin knew for certain what his world looked like, but he seemed to understand that other people would want to piece together his story and try to make sense of it, and that whatever they came up with would inevitably be incomplete. Back in 1979, he allowed a reporter from Rolling Stone to follow him around Hollywood for several days, on the set of Mork & Mindy, at his gym workouts in preparation for Popeye, backstage at the Comedy Store, at home with Valerie.

  When they parted ways for the last time, on a darkened stretch of Los Angeles, Robin turned to the writer and offered this admonition before walking off into the night: “Go, young man, and write your story. In a thousand years, roaches will crawl over your words, their little feelers waving, and say: ‘Come on, let’s keep crawling.’”

  Robin Williams, center, as a sophomore at Detroit Country Day School, the elite preparatory school he attended in Michigan. He wore a sport coat and tie to classes, carried a briefcase, and occasionally slipped one-liners into the otherwise sober speeches that students were required to give at lunchtime.

  Robin as a senior at Redwood High School in Larkspur, California. In 1968, Robin and his family moved to Marin County, north of San Francisco, and Redwood was the most liberal school he’d seen so far. There, Robin ditched the formal attire and acquired his first Hawaiian shirt.

  Robin’s parents, Laurie and Rob Williams, at their home in Tiburon. Rob was
a fastidious, plainspoken, practical Midwesterner whose approval would elude Robin well into his adulthood. Laurie was a lighthearted, fanciful, freespirited Southerner, adoring of Robin and attentive to him.

  Robin as a student at Claremont Men’s College, where he went in 1969 to fulfill his father’s wishes and pursue a respectable, whitecollar career path. Instead, his almost impulsive choice to take an improvisational theater course would change his life forever.

  After dropping out of Claremont and studying theater at the College of Marin, Robin was accepted into the Juilliard School’s recently established Drama Division in 1973. Here he is seen rehearsing for a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Robin was once again bewildered by his transition to a new city and a prestigious, fearsomely competitive school that did not necessarily care whether he flourished or floundered.

  Robin, right, performing as a street mime in New York with Todd Oppenheimer. Straining at the margins of Juilliard’s system, Robin sought unconventional outlets for his creative energy. Wandering Central Park or the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he and Oppenheimer would deliver short routines, often copied from Marcel Marceau or other established mimes.

  Robin and Christopher Reeve speak with John Houseman at a benefit in New York. At Juilliard, Reeve was drawn in by Robin’s boundless vitality, and the two became fast friends. “He was like an untied balloon that had been inflated and immediately released,” Reeve later said of him. Houseman, who ran the Drama Division, was their mentor and taskmaster.

  Robin outside the Comedy Store in Los Angeles. Following a quick ascent in the comedy scene of San Francisco, Robin moved to Los Angeles, where his wild, improvisational style made him a talent to watch. If other stand-ups “were just guys who stood behind the microphone and told jokes,” David Letterman said, Robin “seemed to be hovering above the stage and the tables and the bar.”