The hilarious, tortured life of Robin Williams
The hilarious, tortured life of a comic genius
Robin Dave Itzkoff Henry Holt
Robin Williams and I were hired for our first jobs in TV to work on the doomed reboot of Laugh-In. I was part of an inexperienced writing staff. He was the breakout star of the cast.
We didn’t communicate much. Once when I was visiting my parents in San Francisco, I saw him walking ahead of us on the street. After I yelled out his name, he turned and shouted, “Sister Comedy!” and gave me a hug. The warm feeling remains to this day.
Otherwise, we didn’t maintain a friendship. To be honest, I found him hard to talk to. There was an impenetrable wall inside him. Or, as our mutual friend Dave Letterman once put it, “He’s like a guy within a guy.”
Which brings us to Robin, this immersive, intimate and incredibly detailed new biography by Dave Itzkoff.
Williams was the son of a Ford executive father and a socialite mother who travelled together a lot, both for business and pleasure. They provided the comforts of wealth and a genetic strain of alcoholism with which Robin struggled for the rest of his life.
“I didn’t realize how lonely Robin had been,” his mother said. “... You think you’re being a wonderful mother, but maybe you aren’t.”
I was a stand up neophyte in the late 1970s and witnessed how his ability to make a comedy monologue look like a free-form spontaneous joke cyclone stunned everyone. Williams was so good at spewing out an endless stream of new material it took multiple viewings to discern where he was hiding the structure in this magic trick. I was also there when comics started to complain that he had lifted lines from their acts. Once I even heard one of my own lines go whizzing by. When confronted, Williams explained that this was just a guileless behavioural tic over which he had no control once the comedy spigot had been turned on.
Most of us were unwilling to buy his excuse. But now, viewing that moment through the wider-angle lens of Itzkoff ’s biography, I can see how the endless stimulus, showbiz pressures, relationship tumult, desperate neediness, burgeoning family responsibilities and drugs and alcohol engulfed a guy in his 20s. Williams was launched into a life remarkable for its highs and lows — big movie successes followed by other films so widely despised that their titles (e.g. Patch Adams), became shorthand for terrible.
“Dad’s happiness was correlated very much to how he was doing career-wise,” says his son Zak, who seems to have pursued a life the opposite of his father’s. “When there were films that would be less successful, he took it very personally. He took it as a personal attack. That was really hard for us to see.”
“People expected too much of him,” his longtime friend Billy Crystal explains. “They wanted him to plug that burst, that comet, into every movie, and it just wasn’t fair. Then, when he would do a more sentimental piece, they would just crucify him as sappy, and it would crush him.”
Itzkoff says Williams worried “that his position in the comedy world could be usurped at any moment by a younger, up-and-coming star.”
His longtime makeup artist Cheri Minns recalls how he “got completely freaked out about Jim Carrey, that he was going to take over. (His wife) Marsha had to step in and tell him, ‘There’s room for other people. You don’t have to freak out. There’s room.’”
Itzkoff also includes those Robin Williams moments that wouldn’t be tolerated now. Pam Dawber, his co-star on Mork and Mindy recalls, “I had the grossest things done to me — by him . ... I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people.” But she adds, “I never took offence.” She remains so unperturbed by his sexual overtures that she still refers to “that magic” he had.
Itzkoff describes Williams’ last act through reporting detailed enough to make some sense of his despair, to understand when he took his own life, he’d been transformed by the throes of dementia. Sadly, that doesn’t make the tragedy any easier to bear.
I didn’t realize how lonely Robin had been. ... You think you’re being a wonderful mother, but maybe you aren’t.”