The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  Do you find yourself performing for him?

  Yeah, and sometimes he’ll love it. I did a Señor Wences thing for him. I dressed my fist in a napkin and was Mother Teresa. I played her drunk and made her drink water, which I’d spill down my arm. He liked that.

  The hard part is when you really have to back off and provide him with the time to play alone. Children are a drug. I used to say they beat the shit out of cocaine: You’re paranoid, you’re awake, and you smell bad. It’s this constant metamorphosis. This is a precious time. Some of those lines in Garp ring true. I never thought I would literally sit and watch a child sleep. But you can. I never thought that would be real.

  You’ve been drug free for how long now?

  Five years. Six months before Zach was born I basically stopped everything.

  Do you remember the last time you were on the cover of ‘Rolling Stone,’ in 1982?

  Wasn’t the basic premise that I’d cleaned up my act?

  The headline was “Robin Williams Comes Clean.” Was that honestly the end of the self-abusive chapter in your life?

  There was no going back. I realized that the reason I did cocaine was so I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody. Cocaine made me so paranoid: If I was doing this interview on cocaine, I would be looking out the window, thinking that somebody might be crawling up fourteen floors to bust me or kick down the door. Then I wouldn’t have to talk. Some people might have the metabolism where cocaine stimulates them, but I would literally almost get sleepy. For me, it was like a sedative, a way of pulling back from people and from a world that I was afraid of.

  Going from zero to a hundred on the American fame-o-meter, I take it, was a bit harrowing.

  I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, and then, bang, there’s all this money, and there are magazine covers. Between the drugs and the women and all that stuff, it’s all coming at you, and you’re swallowed whole. It’s like “Whoooaaa!” Even Gandhi would have been kind of hard-pressed to handle it well. [As Gandhi on cocaine] “Just one line, if you pleeeze. I’ll just do a little and save the world—fuck India!”

  Talking about your marriage five years ago, Valerie said, “If I had said, ‘Don’t cross this line,’ he would have been long gone.” In retrospect, was she too tolerant of your indulgences?

  Maybe. I don’t think I would have been long gone. I think I was crying out for someone to say, “Enough.” In the end I had to make my own line. Anybody who finally kicks himself in the ass and wants to clean up makes his own line. You realize the final line is the edge.

  Is the failure of your marriage a great disappointment to you?

  It’s not disappointing. That’s why therapy helps a lot. It forces you to look at your life and figure out what’s functioning and what isn’t. You don’t have to beat your brains against a wall if it’s not working. That’s why you choose to be separated rather than to call each other an asshole every day. Ultimately, things went astray. We changed, and then with me wandering off again a little bit, then coming back and saying, “Wait, I need help”—it just got terribly painful.

  Would you admit you’re tough to live with, even cleaned up?

  Oh, God, yes. I’m no great shakes. It’s the “love me” syndrome combined with the “fuck you” syndrome. Like the great joke about the woman who comes up to the comic after a show and says, “God, I really love what you do. I want to fuck your brains out!” And the comic says, “Did you see the first show or the second show?” One hand is reaching out and the other is motioning to get back.

  Couldn’t you have gotten therapy sooner and circumvented a lot of trouble? Were you afraid of it?

  A little bit. My mother is a Christian Scientist, whose tenets maintain that you can always heal yourself. So I said, “Well, I’ll fix myself.” But there are certain things you can’t fix in yourself. You can get yourself healthy. I kicked drugs alone—I never went to a hospital.

  You may be the only celebrity who beat dependency without the benefit of the Betty Ford clinic. What’s your secret?

  With alcohol it was decompression. The same way I started drinking, I stopped. You work your way down the ladder from Jack Daniel’s to mixed drinks to wine to wine coolers and finally to Perrier. With cocaine, there is no way to gently decompress yourself. It took a few months. Someone said you finally realize you’ve kicked cocaine when you no longer talk about it. Then it’s gone. It’s like pulling away and seeing Pittsburgh from the air. People come up to you with twitching Howdy Doody jaws, and you think, “Hmmm, I looked like that.” You realize that if you saw by daylight the people you’d been hanging out with at night, they’d scare the shit out of you. There are bugs that look better than that.

  How much money do you think you ultimately spent supporting your drug habit?

  The weird thing about the drug habit was that I didn’t have to pay for it very often. Most people give you cocaine when you’re famous. It gives them a certain control over you; you’re at least socially indebted to them. And it’s also the old thing of perfect advertising. They can claim, “I got Robin Williams fucked up.” “You did? Lemme buy a gram, then.” The more fucked up you get, the more they can work you around. You’re being led around by your nostril. I went to one doctor and asked, “Do I have a cocaine problem?” He said, “How much do you do?” I said, “Two grams a day.” He said, “No, you don’t have a problem.” I said, “Okay.”

  A few years ago, you ended one of your cable shows with a vignette about Albert Einstein. You quoted him, saying, “My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe.” What do those words mean to you?

  It’s like Mel Brooks’ great line as the 2,000-year-old man [in a Yiddish accent]: “There’s something bigger than Phil.” You can’t help but see it when you deal with nature in the extreme. Like when you’re bodysurfing on Maui and a storm suddenly makes a ten-foot wave come at you. It gives you a sense of your mortality. Or it’s when you see something incredibly beautiful. I get it when I see Zachary changing. Here’s this being who is you but not you slowly growing and forming opinions of his own.

  It stems, too, from a sense of horror at things that go on in the world. The planet’s climate is changing at such a drastic rate, causing the worst blizzards and droughts in history. Now there is an incredibly large hole in the ozone layer. Like Shakespeare said, this place is such a delicate, fragile firmament. It’s a one-in-a-billion crapshoot. And we’re fucking it up.

  Einstein is your idol, isn’t he?

  Yeah. Good old Al. [Chuckles] Imagine Al doing stand-up. [As Einstein] “So, it’s relative. Does that mean I have to make love to my mother? No, I’m keeding, please! I gotta go. . . . I came back to make a bomb. Nagasaki! Who’s there? It was a joke! Hey, I gotta go!” Wasn’t he wiiiiild?

  LEONARD BERNSTEIN

  by Jonathan Cott

  November 29, 1990

  You once said: “I am a fanatic music lover. I can’t live one day without hearing music, playing it, studying it or thinking about it.” When did this obsession begin?

  The day in 1928 that my aunt Clara, who was in the process of moving, dumped a sofa on my family—I was ten years old at the time—along with an old upright piano, which, I still remember, had a mandolin pedal: The middle pedal turned the instrument into a kind of wrinkly sounding mandolin. And I just put my hands on the keyboard and I was hooked . . . for life. You know what it’s like to fall in love: You touch someone and that’s it. From that day to this, that’s what my life’s been about.

  At first, I started teaching myself the piano and invented my own system of harmony. But then I demanded, and got, piano lessons, at a buck a lesson, from one of our neighbor’s daughters—a Miss Karp. Frieda Karp. I adored her, I was madly in love with her. She taught me beginner’s pieces like “The Mountain Belle.” And everything went along fine until I began to play—probably very badly—compositions that she couldn’t. Miss Karp couldn’t keep up with my Chopin Ballades, so she told my father that I should be sent to the New
England Conservatory of Music. And there I was taught by a Miss Susan Williams, who charged three dollars an hour. And now my father started to complain: “A klezmer you want to be?” To him, a klezmer [an itinerant musician in Eastern Europe who played at weddings and bar mitzvahs] was little more than a beggar.

  You see, until that time, neither my father [who was in the beauty-supply business] nor I really knew that there was a real “world of music.” I remember his taking me when I was fourteen years old to a Boston Pops concert, a benefit for our synagogue, where I fell in love with Ravel’s Bolero, and several months later to a piano recital by Sergei Rachmaninoff—both at Symphony Hall. And my father was just as astonished as I was to see thousands of people paying to hear one person play the piano!

  But still he balked at three-dollar lessons for me. One dollar for lessons and quarter-a-week allowance—that’s all he allotted for my music. So, I started to play in a little jazz group, and we performed at . . . weddings and bar mitzvahs! [Laughs] Klezmers! The sax player in our group had access to stock arrangements for “St. Louis Blues,” “Deep Night” and lots of Irving Berlin songs; and I’d come home at night with bleeding fingers and two bucks, maybe, which went toward my piano lessons.

  Now, my new teacher, Miss Williams, didn’t work out—she had some kind of system, based on never showing your knuckles. Can you imagine playing a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody like that? So I found another teacher . . . at six dollars an hour . . . and therefore I had to play more jazz, and I also started to give piano lessons to the neighborhood kids.

  Meanwhile, I was going to Hebrew school after regular school; and the temple we belonged to [Temple Mishkan Tefila] also introduced me to live music. There was an organ, a sweet-voiced cantor and a choir led by a fantastic man named Professor Solomon Braslavsky from Vienna, who composed liturgical compositions that were so grand and oratorio-like—very much influenced by Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and even Mahler. And I used to weep just listening to the choir, cantor and organ thundering out—it was a big influence on me. I realized, many years later, that the “gang call”—the way the Jets signal to each other—in West Side Story was really like the call of the shofar that I used to hear blown in temple on Rosh Hashanah.

  ‘West Side Story’ is your most famous and successful work. Did you have a sense that it would be so popular when you composed it?

  Not at all. In fact, everybody told us that the show was an impossible project. Steve Sondheim [who wrote the lyrics] and I auditioned it like crazy, playing piano four-hands to convey a quintet or the twelve-tone “Cool” fugue. But no one, we were told, was going to be able to sing augmented fourths—as with “Ma-ri-a” (C to F-sharp). Also, they said the score was too “rangy” for pop music: “Tonight, Tonight”—it went all over the place. Besides, who wanted to see a show in which the first-act curtain comes down on two dead bodies lying on the stage? “That’s not a Broadway musical comedy.”

  And then we had the really tough problem of casting it, because the characters had to be able not only to sing but to dance and act and be taken for teenagers. Ultimately, some members of the cast were teenagers, some were twenty-one, some were thirty but looked sixteen. Some were wonderful singers but couldn’t dance very well or vice versa. And if they could do both, they couldn’t act.

  Somehow it worked out. And it even saved Columbia Records financially—which at the outset didn’t want to invest in or record it. Remember: It was a bad time for popular music. Bebop’s appeal was limited and was practically over, and there was mostly a lot of smarmy ballads sung by people like Johnny Mathis.

  Through your Young People’s Concerts, television specials, books, lectures and preconcert chats, you’ve been giving people an education for more than forty years. You yourself once called teaching probably the “noblest . . . most unselfish . . . most honorable” profession in the world. And you once referred to “this old quasi-rabbinical instinct” you had for “teaching and explaining.” It’s said that in traditional Jewish society, a child, when he was six or seven years old, was carried to the schoolroom for the first time by a rabbi, where he received a clean slate on which the letters of the Hebrew alphabet had been written in honey. Licking off the slate while reciting the name of each letter, the child was thus made to think of his studies as sweet and desirable.

  Though I can’t prove it, deep in my heart I know that every person is born with the love of learning. Without exception. Every infant studies its toes and fingers; and a child’s discovery of his or her voice is one of the most extraordinary of life’s moments. I’ve suggested that there must be proto-syllables existing at the beginnings of all languages—like ma (or some variant of it), which, in almost every tongue, means “mother”—mater, madre, mutter, mat, Ima, shi-ma, mama. Imagine an infant lying in its cradle, purring and murmuring mmm to itself . . . and suddenly it gets hungry. So it opens its mouth for the nipple and out comes mmaa-aa! . . . and thus it learns to associate that syllable with the breast and the pleasure of being fed. Madre and mar [“mother” and “sea”] are almost the same word in Spanish; and in French, mère and mer are near homonyms. The amniotic sea is where you spend your first nine months—that great ocean in which you don’t have to breathe or do anything. It all comes to you. Even after the trauma of being born—which we never get over—there’s still that delight with which children first learn to say ma!

  Then, one day, the kid says “Ma!” and the nipple does not arrive. This can happen on day five or month five of the child’s life; but whenever it happens, it’s an unimaginable shock. I know great big grown-up guys who have jumped—literally jumped—into the arms of their lady therapists and wept, hoping to be cradled at their breasts!

  Like MAH-ler?

  [Laughs] Why not? You know, Mahler made four appointments with Sigmund Freud, and three times he broke them because he was so scared to find out why he was impotent. His wife, Alma—who at various times carried on with [Walter] Gropius, [Oskar] Kokoschka, [Franz] Werfel and Bruno Walter, among others—sent him to see Freud. He was twenty years older than she, and she was the prettiest girl in Vienna—rich, cultured, seductive.

  Didn’t you yourself once meet her?

  Certainly. Many years ago she was staying at the Hotel Pierre, in New York, and she invited me for “tea”—which turned out to be aquavit—then suggested we go to look at some “memorabilia” of her composer husband in her bedroom. I spent a half hour in the living room, a minute or two less in the bedroom. She was really like a wonderful Viennese operetta.

  Anyway, Mahler didn’t pay enough attention to her; he was busy writing his Sixth Symphony up in his little wood hut all night, and she was tossing around in bed. Mahler was terribly guilty about it all—when he gets to the Alma theme in the Scherzo of the Sixth Symphony, the margins of the score are filled with exclamations like “Almschi, Almschi, please don’t hate me, I’m dancing with the devil!” [Sings the Alma theme]

  Mahler finally met up with Freud at the University of Utrecht, where they sat on a campus bench for a couple of hours. And Freud later commented in a letter to one of his pupils, writing something to the effect of “I have analyzed the musician Mahler”—a two-hour analysis, mind you! Freud was as crazy as his patient—“and as you will notice, Mahler’s mother was named Maria, all his sisters had Maria for their middle names, and his wife is named Alma Maria Schindler.”

  “I’ve just kissed a mom named Maria!”

  Indeed. Freud thought that Mahler was in love with the Madonna image and was suffering from the Latin-lover dilemma—the mother versus the whore. You worship the former and fuck the latter. Anyway, Freud considered Mahler to have had this problem in spades. But back to my point about infants who are all born with the craving to learn: having experienced the birth trauma, the denial traumas and the series of other traumas—I almost forgot about gender discovery!—that cause tantrums (the terrible threes, the fearsome fours, the frightful fives). My own granddaughter, according
to her mother (who is my daughter Jamie—the first fruit of my loins), made a great confession when she was two and a half years old. Until then everything had revolved around her—she was the goddess and queen, and now a new baby was expected: Enter Evan! And she went into tantrums! Jamie stroked and caressed and calmed her down until she finally admitted: “You know what, Mommy? I don’t like the new baby.” And just to have come out and said that will probably save her a good ten years on the couch! For each time a kid learns a new trick of manipulating a parent—“I’ll scream, I won’t pay attention, I won’t speak when spoken to”—he or she becomes more cynical and turns off. And each manipulation and each trauma impairs the love of learning with which the infant is born.

  Moreover, anybody who grows up—as those of my generation did not—taking the possibility of the immediate destruction of the planet for granted is going to gravitate all the more towards instant gratification. You don’t get the nipple, so you push the TV button, you drop the acid, you snort the coke, you do the needle: “Right away, right away, yeah, man!” It doesn’t matter that it makes you impotent. You’ve gone so high and then you pass out in the bed . . . and you wake up, cynical and unsatisfied and guilty and ashamed and full of manic fears and anxiety . . . and one thing reinforces the other.