Robin Williams - When the Laughter Stops 1951-2014 (5 page)

New York, meanwhile, was in sharp contrast to San Francisco. The laid-back city on the Pacific was nothing like the teeming metropolis where Williams now lived, home to Broadway, where he would later perform, and one of the most vibrant and exciting places in the world. It was the first time he had lived on his own as an adult (albeit rooming with Reeve) and the first time he was free
of his parents and able to live on his own terms, but the old demons remained.

People were fascinated by his comedy – by the manic element in it – but none of them would have truly understood what lay behind it: the bullied boy reaching out to an absentee mother. He was learning to grow a shell and disguise the hurt by channelling it elsewhere but even the excitement of The Juilliard and New York City could never completely erase the pain. Ominously, it would not be long before he sought other ways of blotting it out but, for now, he was learning fast. In order to make some money, he and a friend did a white-faced mime sequence in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one day earning themselves $75 – quite a decent amount back then.

One of Robin (and Christopher’s) teachers was Edith Skinner, a leading voice and speech coach, who taught them how to speak in different dialects. She soon discovered that Robin could already do so, with no outside help. Michael Kahn was another teacher and, while somewhat dismissive of him as a mere stand-up comic, he was won round after seeing his performance as a young man in Tennessee Williams’
The Night of the Iguana
, which turned into a great success.

Williams continued at The Juilliard for another two years, eventually leaving without actually graduating. Again, stories differ as to why. Some decades back, he could be somewhat diffident about the reason for his departure. According to some versions of the event, he dropped out
of his own accord – again. But in the book
Juilliard: A History
, author Andrea Olmstead recounts that the school told him to leave, although she did include this in a list of ‘blunders that would eventually embarrass the school’. Indeed, The Juilliard has made a great play of talking up the association with Robin Williams and, whatever they might have thought at the time, certainly became pretty proud of the association. He himself never cast a great deal of light on the subject, saying in 2001 that ‘he has no degrees from any colleges yet’. (The Juilliard went on to award him an honorary degree.) But it seems as if The Juilliard significantly underestimated him, seeing him as a comic rather than an actor, and failed to spot the depths below.

Gerald Freedman, dean emeritus of the School of Drama at North Carolina School of the Arts in downtown Winston-Salem, was Williams’ teacher at The Julliard and an interview he gave after Robin’s death may cast further light on the subject. ‘This is beyond sad… He was a genius, out of the box… I was his teacher at Juilliard,’ he told
Time Warner Cable News.
‘He was not a very good fit for a conservative, classical training program, but we recognized his talent and he was a good sport about it. No one was surprised when he left school before he graduated and became what he became. I am so sorry we have lost him, that it came to this. He had so much to say about the world we live in. Perhaps it all got to him. I don’t know.’

Good sport? This would certainly imply that his departure was not entirely of his own choosing but an inability to control his own sense of anarchy, plus the fact that he had
to turn every performance into a comic turn was, again, the sign of an actual need within him. He himself once admitted that he suffered from ‘Love Me’ syndrome and there it was, manifesting itself again.

Robert M. Beseda also hinted that Williams’ temperament was simply unsuited to formal study. ‘He was a great mimic – he could mimic all the teachers like dead on and maybe they didn’t like that,’ he told
News Piedmont.
It was certainly one of life’s ironies that very many students who went on to study at The Juilliard cited Robin Williams as one of their heroes and one of the reasons they were inspired to act. It also implied that he could be somewhat tactless in challenging the authority figures. And the authority figures didn’t like that.

A third version of events has since emerged – it must be said a considerably later one and one that, perhaps, resembles some face saving – on the part of The Juilliard. It has been said that none other than John Houseman suggested Williams should leave on the grounds that there was nothing more The Juilliard could teach him and so he might as well start earning his comedy credential straight away. This doesn’t entirely ring true – The Juilliard is the sort of place that always believes it can teach people something more. But Williams, uncharacteristically, remained silent. Clearly he never felt the need to give his own side of the story, preferring to let it rest.

The actor James Marsters, who appeared as Spike in the TV series
Buffy The Vampire Slayer
(1997–2003) and who
also left The Juilliard early, gave another insight. ‘The joke about Juilliard is the only actors that end up working are the ones that get kicked out,’ he told
Mediatainement Online
in 2001. ‘Robin Williams, John Hurt – the list is endless of people who were told they would never be actors, that they should get out of the business before they become bitter. Juilliard is a heavily regimented acting program and if you have a spirit which is individual, they will try and kick that out of you. And my opinion is that my instincts as an actor are the only thing I have to offer and I wouldn’t let them take that away from me. Ah… so it’s very sweet. I don’t want to put down Juilliard too much except to say it was not the right program for me at all and we both realized it.’

It wasn’t the right program for Robin either, not that it mattered much in the longer term. However, he clearly harboured no ill will because in later years he funded other aspiring students to attend The Juilliard who would not otherwise have been able to do so. Jessica Chastain was one such beneficiary. ‘I’m the first person in my family to go to college,’ she told
Interview
magazine in 2011. ‘We didn’t have a lot of money, and Juilliard is a pretty expensive school. Robin Williams is a very generous Juilliard alumnus, and gives a scholarship every two years to a student, and it pays for everything, and I got it. I still haven’t gotten to meet him.’

Understandably, in the wake of his death she was keen to pay tribute. ‘Robin Williams changed my life,’ she said.
‘He was a great actor and a generous person. Through a scholarship, he made it possible for me to graduate college. His generous spirit will forever inspire me to support others as he supported me. He will forever be missed.’

In later years, of course, the various establishments where Williams studied were all exceedingly keen to ally themselves with a fine actor and comic genius, as he was. He even stayed in touch with some of them, including James Dunn at College of Marin, and his death came as a terrible shock to the institutions and individuals involved in his career, with many of them wishing to pay tribute to the master who had left them (and everyone else) behind.

‘For the first time his eyes looked deep set and his face looked tired,’ Dunn, who occasionally saw Williams over the years, told
MailOnline
, of the last occasion on which they met. ‘He always had an impish charm about him for as long as I can remember but that vanished. There was always this aura around him. He always had women attention. You just couldn’t not love him and that definitely rubbed off on the ladies. He was a womanizer, there’s no doubt about that – and he always seemed to be able to deal with anything.’ (It should be said that Dunn was speaking of the past, not Robin’s marriage to his third wife, Susan Schneider, which had been extremely happy.)

‘He was a sharp guy,’ he continued. ‘And even until recently Robin still seemed to be in good shape despite the major heart problems. There are some people who have demons but Robin wasn’t that way, I never saw him as a
dark person but some comics do have a dark side. I think it’s hard to be funny and pull out the absurdities of life. He did a lot of drugs and then cleaned up on that. Then he got into alcohol and was in rehab a couple of times. When you look back on it you think, “Well, he lived life,” he was like a moth to a flame – eventually he burnt out.’

It must be said that not everyone agrees with Dunn – many believe that Robin Williams had a very dark side indeed. Always there was an underlying sadness there, even in his most manic moments.

Naturally, The Juilliard was similarly affected by his death. Ironically or not, Robin Williams is among its most famous alumni, the boy considered too individual to train as an actor and yet turned out to be one of the finest actors of them all. It put out the following statement.

Post-Juilliard, Williams moved back to California, the place that was to become home for the rest of his life. Whatever his experiences had been to date – and his acting ambitions burned as strongly as ever – one thing was clear: he was blessed with a comic genius and he was going to put it to good use. In his own words though, it came about because his acting wasn’t going so well: ‘I left school and couldn’t find acting work so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up,’ he said. ‘I’ve always improvised and stand-up was a great relief. All of a sudden it was just me and the audience.’ And didn’t he put it to good effect?

Of course, Robin had some previous stand-up experience
but now it was time to make it his career. Already he had performed in San Francisco but now it was time to move on to the Los Angeles circuit, where he began to perform. And, as has been so very well documented since then, not least by Williams himself, he embarked on a journey of self-destruction, involving booze and drugs. He wasn’t the only one… During this time he found out about ‘drugs and happiness’ he revealed, adding that he saw ‘the best brains of my time turned to mud’.

The LA comedy club scene of the 1970s was to produce some of the finest talents in the American entertainment industry to this day. It is a mark of his genius that Williams stood out from the following, who all emerged round about the same time: David Letterman, Andy Kaufman, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis, Sam Kinison, Elayne Boosler, Tom Dreesen and George Miller. All were exceptional talents in their own right but Williams went on to eclipse everyone. Almost immediately he caused a sensation: ‘He seemed to be omnipresent back then and was a topic of discussion wherever he went,’ said the author Merrill Markoe. He was ‘a comedy cyclone. In his act, he was id, ego and super-ego all at the same time.’

Much has been written about Robin’s intense, utterly manic style of stand-up but in some ways it defies analysis, other than to say that the little boy who so desperately wanted the attention of his mother was not so eagerly begging for affection from the entire world. His performances went beyond energetic, beyond frenetic. At
times they seemed dangerous, not because of the subject matter of the material (although it was often highly risqué) but because of what it said about the creator’s own mental state. Vincent Canby, the American film critic who, like Williams, hailed from Chicago, once said the monologues were so intense that his ‘creative process could reverse into a complete meltdown’ – a very prescient observation, given what happened at the end was almost exactly that. Robin himself tried to explain it: the flow of ideas was never-ending, he said, because something was always happening in the world for him to react to. Free association kept the audience interested. And so on.

Williams cited many early influences on his act, including Jonathan Winters, Peter Sellers, Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Lenny Bruce. The reason he enjoyed their acts was that not only were they extremely funny, they were also highly intelligent. All were as erudite as he himself, although it is saying something that none of them, not even Sellers, who Robin most closely resembled as an actor, was anything like as intense.

He particularly admired the work of Jonathan Winters, the improvisational comic who appeared in the hit sci-fi comedy TV series
Mork & Mindy
, who was also a bundle of energy with a huge gift for mimicry. Williams’ description of why he enjoyed him is a very apposite summary of his own work. ‘That anything is possible, that anything is funny… He gave me the idea that it can be free-form, that you can go in and out of things pretty easily,’ author, columnist and
critic Gerald Nachman quotes him as saying. That was true enough and, to a certain extent, anyone could do stand-up… But to do it well? That required a very rare talent and one that it was increasingly obvious that Robin was cultivating in spades.

And he adored working with Winters. ‘It was a joy,’ he said in 2013 in an interview on
Reddit
. ‘I believe I said in the Academy Awards it was like dancing with Fred Astaire but it was even better than that, because being around him, he would perform for anybody. There was no audience too small. I think I once saw him do a cat for a beagle. And I had the same experience watching
The Tonight Show
with my dad. Watching and laughing at Jonathan with my dad helped us become closer, very much so. My favorite Jonathan Winters’ one-liner is “Have you ever undressed in front of a dog?”’

Williams was also a huge fan of Peter Sellers, having heard him on the BBC Home Service radio programme
The Goon Show
, which was groundbreaking in its time, and in an interview, he told presenter Michael Parkinson about Sellers’ performance in the film
Dr. Strangelove
, ‘It doesn’t get any better than that.’ Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, at the forefront of the early 1960s satire boom and another set of erudite and well-educated men, were also influences. Richard Pryor was yet another, although, like Robin, he was also to succumb to drink and drugs.

In fact, it is notable that, with the possible exceptions of Nichols and May, every single one of the artists Williams
cited as early influences was not just extremely funny but very damaged indeed. Winters had had a couple of severe breakdowns and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. Peter Cook became an alcoholic. Dudley Moore struggled with depression. Peter Sellers was never capable of being himself: only happy when performing, he died of a heart attack aged just fifty-four, leaving behind a family full of tragedy and torment. Lenny Bruce was a drug addict, who died at the age of forty after taking an overdose. Richard Pryor, who also died relatively young (sixty-five) from a heart attack in December 2005, had drink and drug problems that, if anything, were worse than Robin’s own. It was becoming more than mere coincidence. Indeed, the majority of the best comedians are damaged – they make people laugh to hide their own pain.

And so began a career that was both the best and the worst path that Williams could have chosen. Such was his energy and exuberance that it simply had to find an outlet somewhere and how better than in making people laugh? He talked about personal issues, he told the presenter Michael Parkinson, because it was ‘cheaper than therapy’ – a highly pertinent observation, not least because he himself was to end up in therapy throughout a great chunk of his life. And in some ways, this was true. If there were personal issues that could make him weep in his private life (and there were – Robin was far more easily moved to tears than anyone realised back then), it must have seemed a blessed relief to take those self-same issues and make people laugh.

But at the same time, it was a manic existence and not one designed to calm down a man already teetering on the edge. It was unstable: performances take place at night and the performer, having given it his all, ends on a high. Where to go from there? To another high, at that stage, this one chemically induced. Williams later revealed that he never drank or took drugs before a performance but he certainly did so afterwards and often performed with a hangover. He only once performed when high on cocaine, which, he said, made him paranoid; it was not a happy combination.

Then there was the fact that he was out on the road, constantly being made aware of other rising talents and surrounded by all manner of temptation that would prove hard to resist. ‘It’s a brutal field, man,’ he is quoted as saying in Gerald Nachman’s excellent book,
Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s.
‘They burn out. It takes its toll. Plus, the lifestyle – partying, drinking, drugs. If you’re on the road, it’s even more brutal. You gotta come back down to mellow your ass out, and then performing takes you back up. They flame out because it comes and goes. Suddenly they’re hot, and then somebody else is hot. Sometimes they get very bitter. Sometimes they just give up. Sometimes they have a revival thing and they come back again. Sometimes they snap. The pressure kicks in. You become obsessed and then you lose that focus that you need.’

Not everyone believed that Robin’s problems were
worse than anyone else’s though. It was, after all, the 1970s: practically everyone in show business was taking drugs. ‘Anyone who grew up in that time had those experiences,’ Chris Albrecht, CEO of Starz and a good friend of Robin’s told
Variety
. ‘Robin was not unique in that way. It was the 1970s.’ That is certainly true but he also had a depressive streak, an addictive personality and a vulnerability that was not obvious when you saw him on stage or, indeed, for most people, in private. He had a self-destructiveness that would certainly not be helped by getting into drugs.

‘Every night was different,’ James Dulworth, who is now a manager at Dangerfield’s Comedy Night Club in New York’s Manhattan, revealed to
CBS News
after Williams’ death. He had been a booker at the Comedy Store when Williams burst onto the scene. And he revealed that Robin’s improvisation was actually a little more rehearsed than it seemed: ‘He developed cards pretty much in his brain for any situation for every single night,’ he said. ‘He already had those ready for almost any situation. The owner of the Comedy Store was Mitzi Shore, Pauly Shore’s mother,’ he went on. ‘I was working for her in the very beginning and she found [Williams] in San Francisco and brought him down [to Los Angeles].’

Others who saw him perform back then testify to a manic genius. ‘He had the audience convulsing with laughter,’ said Mark Breslin, who had hired Williams to perform in the club he then owned in Toronto. Now head of the Yuk Yuk’s chain of comedy clubs, he was talking to
CBC
News.
‘He was doing characters and accents and crazy associations and word games. He turned the entire club into his stage. He walked on the tables and did comedy. He was completely amazing.’

The range of his subject matter startled people. One moment he would be quoting Shakespeare (quoting Shakespeare in the character of someone else, such as Jack Nicholson or Marlon Brando, was to remain a specialty and put to extremely good use in the 1989 movie
Dead Poets Society
); the next he’d be grabbing his crotch to make sure ‘Mr Happy’ was home. He veered all over the place, now pretending to be Elmer Fudd singing rock songs before branching out into a riff on the current political scene. It was impossible for the audience to get bored and equally for them to know what would happen next. ‘Reality! What a concept!’ he would cry but it was sometimes hard to know exactly what his grasp on reality was.

There was a mix of comedy and satire – material that would have been funny at any point and also something that was extremely topical, reflecting on current events. Was it exhausting? Williams was to continue his stand-up well into his television career, leaving the set to go out to entertain another audience but surely the mania and the energy must have had its dark side. Up on stage, the subject of adulation, he was basking in the glory of an audience that was hysterical with laughter but backstage afterwards it was like coming off a high. For someone with his personality it was, perhaps, inevitable that this would leave a hole that
had to be filled somehow. And it wasn’t difficult to see where that would be.

For even then it was apparent that he was a troubled soul. He was beginning to get into drink and drugs in a big way and the perceptive saw this would not end well. ‘I’ll never forget how sensitive he was,’ said Dulworth. ‘You could see how maybe he would become depressed. It probably wasn’t easy to be him. He couldn’t go out there and not be jovial and energetic. He probably needed some of those “boosters” to help maintain that fast-paced, energetic persona. He almost had to do the drugs to maintain that level of performance. It’s almost like steroids with ball players.’ But the fact remained that he was fast developing a drink and drugs problem that he would continue to do battle with for the rest of his life.

There were many other issues he had to deal with and the one that appeared to cause him the most personal hurt was that he stole other people’s material. Most comedians will say that it is hard, at the very least, not to be aware of other people’s material and to recycle it unintentionally but with Robin it went further than that. It finally came out in the public arena in 1989 when
GQ Magazine
wrote, ‘His reputation for taking jokes and quickly making them his own in unequaled, dating back to his sudden emergence in the sitcom
Mork & Mindy.
’ In fact, it pre-dated that. Some comedians not only accused him of blatant joke stealing but also refused to perform in front of him lest their material ended up coming out of his mouth.

‘When he walks into a room,’ the artistic coordinator of a prominent comedy club told
Rolling Stone
in 1991, ‘a lot of comedians don’t want to take the stage. I think Williams has got a huge cloud over his head, and I believe he’s held at arm’s length from the comedy community.’ However, comedienne Whoopi Goldberg sprung to his defence. ‘They made it sound as if Robin were taking their livelihood away,’ she said. ‘Comics do this all the time. Someone says a great line, and it stays with you, and you use it. We had “Make my day.” Everybody was saying it, is that theft?’

Williams himself always said one of his most famous lines – ‘Cocaine is God’s way of telling you, you have too much money’ – was given to him by a stranger. But it was a charge that rankled and did so for the rest of his life.

‘I’m not gonna sit here and plead not guilty,’ he told
Rolling Stone.
‘If you watch comedy eight hours a day, something will register, and it’ll come out. And if it happened, I said, “I apologize. I’ll pay you for this.” But I wasn’t going out of my way to go fucking grave robbing. ’Cause if you’re on top, they’re gonna look for your ass. Then I started getting tired of just paying, just being the chump,’ he continued. ‘I said, “Hey, wait a minute. It’s not true.” People were accusing me of stealing stuff that basically was from my own life. And then I went, “Wait, this is fucking nuts. I didn’t take that. That’s about my mother.” A lot of comedy clubs are like Appalachian encounter groups,’ he went on. ‘Everybody’s doing everybody else. You can go into a club
and see fifteen different people, and they’re all chewing each other apart. You say, “Hello, you prick. That’s mine. I wrote Hello.”’