Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Incisive biography explores planet called Robin Williams
In early 1981, midway through the third season of ABC-TV’s hit series “Mork & Mindy,” an episode titled “Mork Meets Robin Williams” revealed its newly, drastically famous co-star’s conflicted feelings about being famous.
Williams, then 29, played a resident of the planet Ork, confounded by the ways, means and hangups of earthlings. In this episode, he also played himself. The show was like a therapy session. Williams as Williams spoke of the appeal of pretending to be someone else; “characters could say and do things,” he said, regarding his younger self, “that I was afraid to do myself.” Williams as Mork closed the show with a report back to his home planet. He puzzled over how “everybody wants a piece of you” if you’re famous and marveled pityingly at the “responsibilities, anxieties” and the “very heavy price” paid by everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Jimi Hendrix to John Lennon, a recent casualty. He didn’t add “Robin Williams” to that list, but the episode, in effect, wrote the star’s name in invisible ink.
Williams went from mad, whirling stand-up comic to TV star to movie star in what seemed like a flash. Stardom, its rises and falls and demands, intertwined with Williams’ struggles with alcohol and drug addiction. His family lives and marriages were overlapping, fairly complicated, often difficult matters. His interior life remained a partially closed door to even his closest friends and relations.
And then, in Tiburon, Calif., in 2014, at age 63, he hanged himself. The brain disorder plaguing Williams at the end went misdiagnosed for years. His life was one of compulsive creativity and genuine kindness and perpetual insecurity and frequent infidelity and uniquely electric imagination.
Dave Itzkoff ’s biography “Robin” gets its hands around as much of that life as possible. It’s an incisive, comprehensive, very fine book about a star who was a planet, an Ork, unto himself, forever orbiting his own complicated fame.
Williams was accepted into Juilliard in 1973 in New York City, where he met Christopher Reeve, who became a good friend. He did mime in Central Park, and anyone who did needed all the friends he could get.
Then, after honing his stand-up and ingesting a lot of cocaine in San Francisco, Williams hit Los Angeles in 1976. It didn’t take long for word to get around. Stand-up led to “Mork & Mindy.” Fame and its discontents pulled him along. “Popeye,” that bizarre folly, gave Williams his first starring role on screen, though he really didn’t pop until seven years later, when director Barry Levinson shaped “Good Morning, Vietnam” around his prodigious skill set.
Williams scored three Oscar nominations, prior to his supporting actor win for “Good Will Hunting,” with material that allowed him some interpretive leeway: “Good Morning, Vietnam,” followed by “Dead Poets Society,” followed by the more manic Terry Gilliam fantasy “The Fisher King.” He had his most popular top-line showcase in “Mrs. Doubtfire” and killed as the voice of the genie in “Aladdin.”
But he had a wellknown treacle problem. Mechanical heartwarmers, such as “Jakob the Liar” and “Patch Adams,” and, much later, miserable comic vehicles, such as “Old Dogs” and “License to Wed,” were just asking for it. He lived with various demons; when Jim Carrey burst on the scene, Williams thought about him a little too much and too competitively. He fell off the wagon after nearly two decades of sobriety. And he reconfigured his domestic life frequently.
The end, of course, is crushingly sad. Misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s, Williams was in fact suffering from Lewy body dementia. The symptoms include Parkinson’s-like tremors, depression and hallucinations. When Williams was finishing up work as Teddy Roosevelt in the third and final “Night at the Museum” picture in Vancouver, a colleague suggested he stop in at a comedy club and try some stand-up. “I don’t know how to be funny,” he answered.