Why Robin Williams was such a lecher
As it’s revealed he groped his co-star on Mork & Mindy, a new biography explains ...
WHEN, one Monday morning in August 2014, the personal assistant of Robin Williams used a paper clip to open his locked bedroom door and found him hanging dead by his belt inside, the world of showbusiness was stunned.
The actor-comedian had left no note nor had he given any warning.
Not only his millions of fans, but even close friends failed to comprehend how a genius with a reputation for exuberance and humour could have ended his life in such a brutal and solitary manner.
It later emerged that 63-year-old Williams, who had long battled depression, had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s — a degenerative disease that gradually shuts down the body and mind. The autopsy revealed he was actually suffering from undiagnosed Lewy body disease, a devastating brain disorder which causes dementia.
This suggested he had been wrongly diagnosed with Parkinson’s and that his suicide might have been the act of an unhinged mind rather than a coldly deliberate act.
either way, it was a desperately dark final curtain for the much-loved star of films including Mrs Doubtfire, Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society and the irrepressible master mimic who would bring the house down every time he appeared on Parkinson or The Graham Norton Show.
Now a new biography, Robin, seeks to answer the lingering puzzle over Williams’ chaotic life and sudden death. It reveals he was a deeply complicated and contradictory man who battled not only drink, drugs and rampant infidelity but lifelong loneliness and crushing insecurity.
Williams was ‘both wildly outgoing and painfully introverted’, it claims, and even those who spent a lot of time with him barely felt they knew him. He would hide behind the myriad comic characters he created, switching between their voices and personalities with mesmerising speed. Few people could recall ever having a serious conversation with the real Williams.
Biographer Dave Itzkoff also reveals how Williams’s treatment of women repeatedly crossed the line in terms of acceptability, only for his famous twinkly-eyed charm and childlike manner to come to his rescue and earn forgiveness.
It has already emerged how, while making Mork & Mindy, the hugely popular TV comedy series that catapulted Williams to fame in the late Seventies, he would grope his pretty co- star Pam Dawber, grabbing her breasts and bottom, breaking wind on her and even exposing himself to her on set. ‘Somehow he could get away with it,’ she says now. ‘ It was the Seventies, after all.’
But that wasn’t the half of it, says Itzkoff, who believes the acute insecurity Williams experienced throughout his life stems from his unsettled childhood.
Williams was born in 1951. His wealthy father’s job as a senior executive for the Ford motor
company meant the family moved around the U. S. regularly. At school, Williams was always the new boy and had difficulty making friends. He learnt that telling jokes was effective in keeping the bullies off his back.
His father was often away on business and his mother frequently accompanied him, leaving Williams to be raised by servants.
The star — who had two much older half-brothers — sought companionship with his toys, spending hours in an attic of a mansion when they lived in Detroit. He invented different personalities and voices for hundreds of toy soldiers, sometimes borrowing the voices of favourite stand-up comics he had taped from the TV.
In a sense, says Itzkoff, he never left that attic. He would spend his entire life surrounded by fictional friends — the characters he would mimic — and emotionally cut off from real people.
Still, he was deeply influenced by his parents — his fastidious, serious father bequeathing to Williams a fierce intelligence and tendency to lapse into long silences, while his light-hearted mother instilled a love of entertaining others.
They expected him to become a diplomat and his father wasn’t pleased when Williams fell in love with acting. He warned him to learn a skill ‘such as welding’ in case it fell through.
Friends believe that, even if subconsciously, Williams’s determination to succeed reflected a desire to impress his father. Teachers at the acclaimed Juilliard drama school in New York certainly weren’t that impressed, accusing Williams of ad-libbing for laughs to make up for acting limitations.
He had far more success when he turned to stand-up comedy in Los Angeles, impressing rivals with his arsenal of dirty jokes and astonishing ability at mimicry.
Cocaine was rife in LA’s hardpartying comedy scene and it was here that Williams began an ‘enduring pattern of behaviour,’ says Itzkoff, staying up past dawn drinking and taking drugs with other comedians.
Bob Davis, a friend from school days who went to see Williams on stage, was ‘stunned’ by what he witnessed in a car park after one show. ‘Some guy just walked up to him [Williams] with a spoon full of cocaine, held it up to his nose, and — whoosh,’ he recalled. ‘ This wasn’t a friend of his — this was a fan who just walked up.’
Valerie Velardi — a dancer and Williams’ girlfriend until they married in 1978 — tolerated his after-hours debauchery, hoping it would inspire his performances.
She also put up with his heavy drinking and infidelity, even when he boasted about the latter on stage. Valerie claimed any man would have to be a ‘saint’ to resist the attractive women who threw themselves at her husband.
Perhaps it was such indulgence from his wife that made Williams feel he could get away with any outrageous behaviour while making Mork & Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982.
Williams loved to go ‘off script’ and many of his improvisations were sexual, directed at the women in the cast, Itzkoff reveals.
More often than not, his target was Mindy, played by Dawber. A 26- year- old former model just breaking into acting, she admits she was intimidated by his ‘ brilliance’. She laughed off his dirty behaviour to her as his way of expressing affection for her.
‘I had the grossest things done to me by him,’ she told Itzkoff. ‘And I never took offence. I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. He probably did it to a lot of people... he’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your t**s and run away.’
The show’s director Howard Storm put it down to the hyperactive Williams just getting ‘bored’, recalling: ‘He’d be doing a paragraph and in the middle of it he would just turn and grab her arse. Or grab a breast. And we’d start again. I’d say, “Robin, there’s nothing in the script that says you grab Pam’s arse.” And he’d say, “Oh, OK.”’
Garry Marshall, the show’s producer, said Williams’s ‘ aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush’. Going offstage while she was continuing a scene, Williams ‘ would take all his clothes off, be standing there totally naked and she was trying to act’, he said.
Williams’s marriage couldn’t survive his mega-fame. Although he publicly disowned the drug, which he called the Devil’s Dandruff, Williams binged on cocaine every night and binge-cheated on his wife.
Whenever colleagues would hear she was coming to the Mork & Mindy set they would rush away whichever woman he was seeing at the time. ‘ He was out all night and screwing everybody in town,’ said Storm.
The death of actor John Belushi from a drug overdose in 1982 shook up Williams, who had been carousing with him only hours earlier. After Valerie gave birth to their son, Zak, in 1983, Williams vowed to clean up his act. He overcame his drug and drink problems but found it harder to ‘kick’ the women.
In 1984, he started a two-year affair with a cocktail waitress, Michelle Carter.
Three years later came Good Morning, Vietnam, his first hit after a string of dismal films, in which he played a DJ on U.S. Forces radio. It was while filming in Vietnam that he started an affair with Marsha Garces, Zak’s former nanny and now Williams’ trusted assistant and confidante. He and Valerie split in 1988, and Williams married Marsha the following year. The second Mrs Williams took an active role in managing his career, tempering his often appalling judgment in the films he made. The Nineties was to be a golden period in which he made Mrs Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting, which earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
The couple had two children, Zelda and Cody. But for Williams, the glass — metaphorically speaking — was always half empty.
He spent considerable time in therapy, his major terror being that he was about to be eclipsed by a younger comedy superstar.
In the 2000s, he again suffered a run of box-office flops and was also rocked by the deaths of his parents and two close actor friends, Christopher Reeve and Richard Pryor.
He started drinking heavily again and considered suicide — ‘sitting naked’, he said, ‘ in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s’.
He drank not just because he was upset by his friends’ passing — it was ‘ more selfish than that’, he admitted darkly. ‘It’s just literally being afraid and you think this will ease the fear.’
In 2006 he went into rehab but, having lied to his wife about his drinking, he had ruined another marriage. They split up in 2008 and Williams returned to Tiburon, the quiet California town where he had last lived with his parents.
It was a trip down memory lane in more ways than one. He bought a house whose main feature was a huge windowless room — more like a bunker — where he meticulously curated a vast collection of toy soldiers, thousands strong and covering many wars. The few visitors who were allowed in reported that it was spotless.
‘I think if you moved a soldier at all, he would know it,’ said a friend. ‘ People wondered, why is he collecting them, still? But I think they were his friends.’
With two ex-wives to support, he had to get back to work but in 2009 he needed major heart surgery.
By then, a new woman had emerged in his chaotic private life — Susan Schneider, a graphic designer and recovering alcoholic.
They married in 2011 but, two years later, he was beset by health problems including dramatic weight loss and motor function impairments.
Williams couldn’t remember his lines while making a sequel to the film Night At The Museum and would pour his heart out to Cheri Minns, his long-time make-up artist. ‘He was sobbing in my arms at the end of every day,’ she says. ‘At night I was on my computer, looking up, “How to deal with a paranoid” so that I wouldn’t say the wrong thing.’
The following May he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s but couldn’t understand why doctors assured him he had another ‘good ten years’ while he knew his brain was ‘out of control’. His managers told close friends to keep quiet about his depression.
To Williams, says Itzkoff, the diagnosis was ‘the realisation of one of his most deeply felt and lifelong fears, to be told that he had an illness that would rob him of his faculties, by small imperceptible increments every day, that would hollow him out and leave behind a depleted husk of a human being’. A
T 10.30pm on Sunday, August 10, 2014, Williams said goodnight to his wife and took an iPad with him to his bedroom (they had begun to sleep separately since his health deteriorated).
Susan thought the iPad was a good sign as he hadn’t read anything for months. It wasn’t.
She left the house at 10.30 the next morning, believing he was still asleep. Shortly before noon an assistant found his body hanging. He had cuts on his left wrist. A bloodied penknife was nearby.
The tragedy soon turned to open war between his widow and children over his estate. Williams’s son Zak describes Susan as having thought she ‘struck gold’ with his father, while she accused him and his siblings of having possessions filched from her home.
There may never be a definitive answer to what prompted his suicide. Many friends insist it must have been the dementia, refusing to believe that such a loving father would have consciously abandoned his family. Others, such as the actor Billy Crystal, say it was reasoned and deliberate.
Crystal recalls Williams quizzing him about what happened to Muhammad Ali after he got Parkinson’s. ‘ He was seeing himself,’ he says. ‘My heart breaks that he suffered and only saw one way out.’
It’s certainly clear that Williams lived to work. First wife Valerie once summed him up as a ‘stimulus junkie’, addicted to performing in front of an audience as much as to cocaine or alcohol.
‘He operated on working. That was the true love of his life,’ said make-up artist Cheri.
‘Above his children, above everything, if he wasn’t working he was a shell of himself. And when he worked, it was like a light-bulb was turned on.’