‘Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money’
Robin Williams was noisy to the point of cacophonous, energetic and peppy to the point of hypomania.
His comic style, in his stand-up acts and more than 80 movies, was unrelenting, unrelaxed — a shriek of multicoloured consciousness. ‘ You got to be crazy,’ he believed. ‘ madness is the only way i’ve stayed alive.’ (a british counterpart would be spike milligan.)
Even as a child, Williams was the same. ‘You couldn’t keep up with his mind,’ said a former schoolfriend. it was going so fast. He was going off on all these tangents.’
it is not a surprise that only death could provide Williams with that ‘quiet inwardness’ which had always eluded him.
This is therefore a rather grim biography, as Williams’s helter- skelter personality and frantic career were heading only in one possible direction. His suicide, in July 2014, was almost a foregone conclusion.
Williams’s father was a wealthy executive in the Detroit motor industry. His mother was a southern belle. There were big homes, servants, a private education.
Though there were step- siblings, they were grown-up, and Williams, born in 1951, was more or less an only child, left to his own devices. He loved Danny Kaye, Peter sellers and alec Guinness movies.
at college, Williams was the class clown. ‘i learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person.’
a contemporary remembered: ‘He was a total show- off, but in a very endearing way . . . He would almost literally bounce off the walls with craziness.’
in 1973, he went to the Juilliard school to study drama, arriving in new York wearing Hawaiian shirts and thong sandals.
His professor was the venerable John Houseman, who pontificated about the sacredness of the theatre, ‘ and a week later we saw him in a Volvo commercial’.
Williams couldn’t really be taught anything. He wasn’t able to rehearse or repeat himself, as that was stultifying, and was at his happiest in nightclubs, delivering an off-the-cuff stand-up routine.
He’d pretend to be a clueless Russian, a venal evangelist or a munchkin. He’d speak in lots of different accents, and riffed about politicians (‘i believe Ronald Reagan can make this country what it once was. a large arctic region covered with ice’); city life (‘Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?’) and feminism (‘if women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days’).
not all of this would find favour in 2018.
HE
quicKlY came to the attention of television producers. mork and mindy, in which Williams played an alien from the planet ork confused by Earth’s customs and technology, was created in the late seventies with his talents in mind.
His starting salary of $15,000 a week was increased to $ 40,000 as viewing figures rocketed to 26 million.
Williams’s growing reputation, however, contributed to his eventual downfall. He’d discovered drugs and was soon to come out with his famous quip: ‘cocaine is God’s way of saying you are making too much money.’
He was present in the bungalow suite at the chateau marmont Hotel the night actor John belushi died from an overdose at 33. ‘ cocaine was in the city’s bloodstream,’ biographer David itzkoff reminds us.
Every night, until dawn came up, Williams drifted from club to club, as addicted to applause as he was to chemical stimulants. but with the leaping and racing, rapping and galloping, came a distinct lack of judgment.
Williams’s marriages curdled, as ‘Robin was openly running around Hollywood’ with other women. His behaviour on the set of mork and mindy, seen as playful at the time, now looks like blatant sex abuse as he goosed his co-star, Pam Dawber, pinching her bottom and breasts.
‘He would take all his clothes off,’ said a studio hand. ‘He would stand there totally naked and Pam Dawber was trying to act. His aim in life was to make her blush.’
over the next 30 years Wi l l i a m s worked for top directors, won an oscar for Good Will Hunting and made a fortune from mrs Doubtfire, which took $220 million at the box office. The nanny’s make-up took four hours to apply.
He was the inspirational schoolteacher in Dead Poets society, and made (for my taste) far too many soppy films, aiming for nobility and pathos: Hook, Toys, Jumanji, Jack, Flubber, Patch adams. Williams became a byword for sentimentality, as sickly sweet as Jerry lewis.
only twice was his true genius served — in Good morning Vietnam, where he spouted his comic commentary over the military radio; and aladdin, where as the genie his nervous style was brilliantly matched by Disney’s inventive animation.
Towards the end, a torment emerged uppermost. ‘ i don’t even know what’s funny any more,’ he was heard to say, and the drinking and drug-taking became excessive. ‘i was buying so many bottles of Jack Daniel’s, i sounded like a wind chime walking down the street.’ His health broke down completely. He had heart surgery in 2009, was placed on antipsychotic medication for severe depression and was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. ‘Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it,’ says itzkoff. Fast becoming ‘a depleted husk of a human being’, Williams hanged himself. His bedroom, incidentally, was found to be filled with toy soldiers, pin-ball machines and video games — like a teenager’s.
Williams had clearly done his utmost to remain always at the emotional level of an adolescent, because he could never face grown-up responsibilities.
as he said: ‘The only difference between me and a leprechaun is i snorted my pot of gold.’