by Dave Itzkoff
The purpose of the masks, Harley said, was that “they changed your body, and actors should have bodies that transform and change, and tell you something about the person that you’re playing. Those masks helped you to transform your physical self, which is something so many actors can’t do. I would imagine that was the most valuable class that Robin took.”
But other instructors felt that Robin was bumping up against his limitations as an actor and trying to use his sense of humor to skirt around them. In her speech class, Elizabeth Smith said, “I used to give him big, heroic poems to make him breathe and open up. I remember thinking how absurd it was that I was asking this young man to do this. Because it was obviously so far removed from anything he would end up doing. There was no question that he had a future. But it certainly wasn’t in speaking heroic verse.” With a laugh, she added, “He used to try very, very hard not to send it up, not to make fun of it. But he couldn’t do it straight. He just couldn’t.”
Within his first few weeks, Robin clashed with Michael Kahn, another of his acting instructors. Asked to perform a monologue for the class, Robin presented a rambling, satirical sermon delivered by Alan Bennett in the British comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. Reeve would say later that Robin’s delivery “was even funnier than the original” and that his “characterization, timing and delivery were impeccable,” earning applause from the other students. But Kahn was unimpressed. In front of the class, he told Robin, “It looks like you were enjoying yourself.” He waited for a moment, then said, “It’s like someone who peed into their corduroy pants.” And just to twist the knife further, he added, “You feel fabulous. We see nothing.” (As Kahn later explained, “You can’t see pee in corduroy pants. He didn’t like me very much.”)
The Juilliard faculty began to question whether Robin was equipped for its advanced program. “He didn’t have a basic foundation of how to approach acting,” Kahn said in reflection. “It was coming from a kind of manic intuition, and it was, finally, an act of imitation rather than an act of creation.” Before his first year was out, Robin was asked to give up his place in Group IV and pursue a customary four-year track as a member of Group VI, and he agreed to the arrangement.
Through good news and bad, Robin came to depend on his friend Reeve. They affectionately called each other “brother,” and they would sit together on the roof of Reeve’s building to indulge in cheap wine and war stories about the women they had pined for. “Many of our classmates related to Robin by doing bits with him, attempting to keep pace with his antics,” Reeve later said. “I didn’t even try. Occasionally Robin would need to switch off and have a serious conversation with someone, and I was always ready to listen.”
But at the end of his first Juilliard term, Robin found himself at an emotional ebb, feeling alone and abandoned, and he experienced what he would later characterize as a mental breakdown. Robin was unable to afford a trip home to Tiburon for Christmas, and as the school emptied out, he stayed in New York for the holiday, in a cold and unfamiliar city that felt more deserted than usual. “New York seemed unbearably bleak and lonely,” he said.
One day, I just started sobbing and I couldn’t stop, and when I ran out of tears my body kept going; it was like having emotional dry heaves. I went through two days like that and finally hit rock bottom and realized I had a choice: I could either tube out or level off and relax. At that point, I became like a submarine on the bottom that blows out some ballast and gets back up again.
“Once all my anxieties were behind me,” he said, “the rest of that year was easy.”
Robin made other friends among the classmates he lived with in a low-rent floor-through apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Its open space was partitioned with curtains that did not quite reach from the ceiling to the floor, creating more bedroom areas but not much privacy. “Whatever you were doing in your room, you could easily share it with the world if you weren’t careful,” said Frances Conroy, who inhabited one of these subdivisions. The building was walking distance from the Lincoln Center campus, though not always an easy stroll. “You would have to walk with someone else to get home safely,” said Kevin Conroy, another student who lived there.
When Richard Levine and Paul Perri, the apartment’s original tenants, first met Robin, he was still a California bohemian striving to fit in with the crowd. “One time, Paul and I had to sit Robin down and tell him that he couldn’t use the word funky anymore, that it was driving us crazy,” Levine recalled with a laugh. “We said every third word out of your mouth is ‘funky’ and you have to stop.”
His penchant for letting his girlfriends stay with him in the tiny, exposed compartment he rented did not endear Robin to other residents. “He did have some long-term girls in his life,” said one person who lived with him. “He had one girl come and I think she stayed for six months. In a room without walls going to the ceiling. So as his roommates, we were not pleased.”
At other times, Robin was absent from the apartment for long stretches and it wasn’t clear where he was staying. As far as Frances Conroy could tell, she said, “He may have even slept in the school some nights when he didn’t have a place to live. You could easily do that, because you could find a couch onstage, and have a place to sleep for the night. And there were showers, and then if you wanted to, you could go down to the cafeteria and get some food once the school opened.”
“Everybody got by however they could,” she said. “Everybody’s private life was whatever it was.”
“I didn’t know there were times that Robin was desperate to eat,” she added.
Just as at the College of Marin, Robin quickly ran through what little cash he possessed and was in debt to nearly everyone. He could always depend on the kindness of administrators: Margot Harley said that she would often find Robin at the building with empty pockets and an empty belly, and she would take mercy on him. “I used to bring him breakfast,” she said. “He came from a family that certainly wasn’t poor. But he was always short of money.” By night, Harley said, Robin was helped by a similarly charitable cleaning woman who brought him dinner.
The thought that Robin could be having trouble with food, money, or basic personal maintenance was totally alien to his Drama Division peers. “We were all baby boomers, raised in one of the fattest times in American history,” said Paul Perri. “And Robin’s parents probably had more money than some, but there were some people with a ton of money that went to Juilliard. The rarity was on the other side, of people who were lower middle class or working class, or outright poor. You didn’t see that much in a conservatory.”
None of these problems diminished Robin as a performer. In his first student production, while still a member of Group IV and the advanced training program, Robin was cast in The Night of the Iguana, the gothic Tennessee Williams drama about a disgraced priest reduced to working as a tour guide and the unusual cohort of characters he encounters in a Mexican hotel. Robin played Nonno, a wheelchair-bound ninety-seven-year-old man who spends the play trying to compose a poem from memory.
Despite the drubbing Robin had taken in class from Michael Kahn, Reeve said that this performance “immediately silenced the critics.” “His portrayal of an old man confined to a wheelchair was thoroughly convincing,” Reeve said. “He simply was the old man. I was astonished by his work and very grateful that fate had thrown us together.”
In a later production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Robin brought a delightful physicality to the role of the fairy Mustardseed, and even helped to fine-tune the character’s costume for a few extra laughs. As Harley recalled Robin’s performance, “He was on the floor, projecting himself along with his bottom, and he had rigged up a hat, so that when he spoke, the hat popped up. It was so funny. It was perfectly clear that he was incredibly creative and that he was a very special talent, from the very beginning, even though he didn’t have any acting technique. He was clearly, wildly talented, but he just didn’t have a technique yet. It’s something you h
ave to learn—you don’t just get up there and act.”
Not that Robin needed anything as elaborate as a stage or a script or even a hat to enthrall onlookers. Paul Perri said they once found themselves passing time together in a hallway, when Robin was invigorated by the sight of a soda vending machine. “And out of the blue, he decided to just fuck around,” Perri said. “He did five minutes of just imitating a Coke machine. It was funny, but of course everything’s funny when you’re young. The thing that stayed with me about it was the five-minute part. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It wasn’t just a concept. It was fully realized. It was beautiful and it was physically adept. And it was hilarious. Robin could think faster than anybody I ever saw.”
However, Perri could not say with certainty that Robin had made up the routine on the spot. “Things that would be extemporaneous in anybody else, he might have been thinking about for a long time,” Perri said.
Kevin Conroy also suspected that the voices and characters that appeared to spring spontaneously from Robin had been previously workshopped in other settings. “Everything you saw, the facile ability to jump from character to character, it looked like he was creating in that moment—he wasn’t,” Conroy said. “He had honed those characters for years and years. He studied people.”
“The emotional turmoil in him was about a quarter-inch beneath the surface,” said Conroy, who was nonetheless envious of Robin’s ability to make it look easy and extemporaneous. “He was head and shoulders above any of the rest of us in that group—and it was a good group,” he said.
Other classmates regarded Robin as a hardworking, quietly bookish artist in training. The author Kevin Sessums, who started at Juilliard two years after Robin as a member of Group VIII, remembers seeing him in a student workshop of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, playing the Boy, a mute and mournful character who ends his life by suicide. At a rehearsal break, Sessums noticed that “many of the students broke off into little groups to gossip or giggle and go over their lines,” but Robin “sat in a chair all by himself and retrieved a book from his backpack.” When he saw that it was Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow’s sweeping historical novel about New York at the turn of the twentieth century, Sessums, who had also been reading the book, approached Robin and asked who his favorite character was. Robin replied that it was Harry Houdini, the master stage illusionist and escape artist, who appears throughout the novel as a recurring motif of fame and celebrity. Saying so, Robin pointed to an early page and began to read from a pored-over passage:
His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd.
Transported by Doctorow’s evocations of that bygone era, Robin offered a brief comment. “It doesn’t get much better than this,” he said.
Still, there were lessons that Juilliard could not teach Robin, desires it could not fulfill, and itches it could not scratch. For those, he would turn to mime. The strange, silent theatrical technique—one that needed no equipment or props, other than black-and-white face paint, and required no formal stage or scenery—was one he indulged in from time to time with Todd Oppenheimer, an acting student at the Neighborhood Playhouse and a fellow émigré from the Bay Area. Oppenheimer had struggled as a solo mime performer in Central Park and other public spaces around New York, but his prospects improved when a mutual friend introduced him to Robin.
As he was speaking to his friend on a Manhattan sidewalk, Oppenheimer recalled, “Bouncing down the street comes this guy in painter’s overalls and a Dutch boy cap, bounces right up and says hello in this beautiful, stentorian voice. Then he turns in my direction and says, ‘It’s great seeing somebody doing mime again in the park.’ Something that suggested he knew it or had done it himself.” When Oppenheimer asked him if he performed it himself, Robin demurred: “Oh, not really,” he answered. “I’ve played with things.” But, Oppenheimer continued, “Having nothing better to think of, I said, ‘Well, you want to do it with me? I’m looking for a partner.’ What I realized is that I had to have somebody for support, so we could at least commiserate with each other when people walked away.”
They practiced their ad hoc mime partnership on days off from their formal education, when Oppenheimer would head over to Robin’s apartment around eleven a.m. to wake him up and get their makeup on. “He was just so undisciplined, and there was always a different girl over there,” Oppenheimer said. Then, in striped shirts and painter pants—which Robin would wear held up by a pair of rainbow suspenders—they would walk to Central Park or the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, using those several blocks to warm up and get into character.
Robin was “not the kind of guy who had much patience for rehearsal,” Oppenheimer said, “but we planned a few things,” many of which were routines they copied from established mime artists.
Among them, Oppenheimer said, was the character of a mask maker, a piece that he had previously seen performed by Marcel Marceau. “It’s a guy sitting on a bench making masks,” he explained, “and he keeps trying them on. There’s an angry face, and a sad face and a laughing face. He eventually gets one stuck on, and it’s the smiling face. And as he realizes it’s stuck, he goes through a whole sequence of emotions—but his face has to remain smiling.”
In another routine, either he or Robin would play the role of a small child being led around a store as his mother holds his hand. “He’s getting in trouble and he’s reaching for candy and his mom’s reaching down and slapping him,” Oppenheimer said. “You get this whole visual sense of this tiny person, because he’s always looking up and his hand’s up in the air. And eventually he has to pee, and he tries to get his mom’s attention but she’s busy shopping. It gets worse and worse, and she will not listen to him, and the more he bothers her the more she thinks he’s bothering her. The kids just love it, because they’ve all been there.”
Sometimes a bit would consist of nothing more than a wicked imitation of a bystander he or Robin might spot in their audience. “If you did your job,” Oppenheimer said, “the person you were imitating wouldn’t even know you were there. They would look at the crowd, and they would see the crowd looking at them. And they wouldn’t know why everyone was staring at them. They’d look down at their shoes, they’d check their zipper, they’d do whatever. Then they’d think, is there something behind me? Then they’d look, and if you were agile enough, you’d move with them so they couldn’t see you. It would just get funnier and funnier, and worse and worse.”
These free-form forays in front of unsuspecting and occasionally hostile audiences were also formative experiences in rejection. Once while he was doing a mime routine in front of an apartment building, Robin was doused from above with a sudden splash of water—he looked up in time to see someone pouring it on him from an upper floor. As he later described the experience, “It was like getting slapped in the face.” It became a war story he later shared with friends, not to boast about how far he’d come but to illustrate how vulnerable and exposed performers are. The sudden, painful shock of getting doused like that was one that Robin would reenact for years to come, often recoiling as he acted out the moment—one of many small battle scars he’d bear forever.
Robin’s Juilliard classmates felt he was straining at the margins of a system designed to break students down and put them back together like new. “The school did have a tendency to want to strip you of you
r own personal idiosyncrasies,” Richard Levine said. “In time, you gain a little bit more choice and have more options available to you, as you reinstate your idiosyncrasies, but you’re not glued to them if a part required something else. I understand the philosophy and it had a real intelligence to it. But I think for Robin, it was very stultifying. He really did need to spread his wings and do his thing.”
Oppenheimer, his mime partner, thought he saw Robin growing disenchanted with Juilliard, too. But then again, he said, “You never had a serious conversation with Robin.”
In the summer of 1974, his friend Christopher Reeve was cast in the popular CBS soap opera Love of Life and was given permission to take a leave from the school. The role led to other roles and set him on a path to stardom, and he would never complete his Juilliard training. Meanwhile, Robin fell in love with a woman he’d met who, like him, had recently moved to New York from California. Though he never gave her name publicly, he described her as “a free spirit who thought nothing about walking through tough neighborhoods wearing white lace gowns. I told her that if she kept it up, she’d get killed, and she said, ‘No, my aura will defend me.’”
In the summer of 1975, between Robin’s second and third years at Juilliard, he and his girlfriend returned to California, where the love affair became even more passionate. But when Robin returned to New York in the fall, she did not come with him, and their separation badly brought him down. “I really missed my lady friend and I began running up $400-a-month telephone bills—and at the time I was having trouble just making the rent,” he said. “The tension of a long-distance romance was such a drain.”
Shelly Lipkin, Robin’s friend from the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts, said his angst about the relationship was sincere and overwhelming. “He would call me, sometimes at one or two o’clock in the morning, really heartbroken, because he wasn’t sure if she was seeing someone else,” Lipkin said. “What was going on? She didn’t call back right away. He was really upset about it.”
