Bio unmasks Robin Williams’ tormented body, soul
A new biography of Robin Williams chronicles the comedian’s topsy-turvy public and private lives, which involved infidelities, groping and flashing of his Mork & Mindy co-star Pam Dawber, rehab from drug and alcohol abuse, and a rare brain disorder diagnosed only after his suicide by hanging in 2014. He was 63.
In Robin (Henry Holt, out May 15), author Dave Itzkoff writes that Williams’ first wife, Valerie Velardi, tolerated his liaisons: “Valerie could never quite bring herself to condemn Robin for his infidelities; she seemed to accept them as an occupational hazard of stardom.”
That changed however, when his two-year affair with a cocktail waitress ended, and the other woman, Michelle Tish Carter, sued him for $6.2 million, alleging (inaccurately, it turned out) that he had given her herpes. The suit became public in 1988, and Velardi divorced Williams that year.
In 1989, Williams would marry Marsha Garces, who had risen from being the family nanny to his professional assistant. But by 2006 his drinking and drug use led to the unraveling of his second marriage. That summer he began a stint at the Hazelden Foundation center, a rehab facility in Oregon.
The 400-plus-page biography also documents an insecure star who for all his successes (an Oscar, plus Emmys and Grammys) could be worried by the rise of rival comic Jim Carrey, as well as over his personal finances — despite pulling down as much as $15 million a film.
His behavior became increasingly strange into his early 60s. He was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and in June 2014 entered rehab even though he was not drinking or doing drugs. It was a move inspired by desperation: Nothing else seemed to be helping.
(Williams’ behavior was later attributed to “diffuse Lewy body disease”; the diagnosis came from analysis of his brain tissue after his death.)
Itzkoff writes that Susan Schneider, Williams’ third wife whom he married in
2011, became seriously concerned about his health, physical and mental, in fall
2013. On the night before he hanged himself, the author writes, Williams “began to fixate on some of the designer wrist watches that he owned and grew fearful that they were in danger of being stolen.” He took several of them and stuffed them in a sock and drove them to a friend’s house nearby for safekeeping.
He went to bed the next night around
10:30, and his wife, who slept in a separate bedroom, let him sleep in. When he didn’t answer her late that morning of Aug. 11, she forced the lock and found him dead, his belt around his neck.
After her husband’s death and diagnosis, Schneider told Good Morning America: “It was like this endless parade of symptoms, and not all of them would raise their head at once. It was like playing whack-a-mole. ... We’re chasing it and there’s no answers, and by now we’ve tried everything.”