by Dave Itzkoff
“I saw the way this dude was dressed,” said Ritter, “in baggy pants, suspenders, a beaten-up tux over high-topped sneakers, a straw hat with the brim falling off, John Lennon glasses with no glass in the frames, and I thought, ‘Well, this guy is definitely going for the sight gag.’ I was almost a bit suspicious. So I watched carefully and he turned out to be the funniest guy I’ve ever seen.”
As Ritter recalled, “The first bit I ever saw him do was a kiddie-show host, and it was the most demented thing you can imagine. He brought these puppets onstage and did these weird voices, and wound up doing an S&M routine with the puppets that’s indescribable.
“He took care of me onstage, because I’d never try to top him,” Ritter said. “I headed right for the straight-man role.”
Another student in the class was the singer-songwriter Melissa Manchester, who was then the wife and client of Larry Brezner, a partner at the talent firm of Rollins, Joffe, Morra & Brezner. He would often visit these workshops to scout for new prospects, and Robin was an immediate standout. “I watched this one kid get up, and no matter what situation was thrown at him, he never got lost,” Brezner said. “In an improv, right before the blackout, you’ve either won or lost; you either hit the big line or it lays there. I watched two hours of this kid never losing, reacting off the top of his head, working off nerve impulses—not intellect at all.” Comparing him to the disillusioned and achingly sincere young protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, Brezner said that Robin was “like Holden Caulfield, a guy walking around with all his nerve endings completely exposed.”
Robin had tried working with other management firms before, with little to show for it. Earlier in his Hollywood apprenticeship, he had been handled by three different managers in a two-week period, one of whom sent him to audition for a role in CHiPs, the TV drama about a pair of motorcycle cops on the California Highway Patrol. “They wanted a strapping six-footer who could ride a Harley-Davidson,” Robin said. “I’d never ridden a motorcycle and I stood five-eight, maybe 135 pounds.… I realized: ‘This is no good. This man is not for me.’”
For any comedian, the representation of Rollins, Joffe, Morra & Brezner was all but a guarantee of prosperity and fame—the key to the very best opportunities that the entertainment industry could provide. In exchange for a 15 percent commission of a performer’s earnings, the firm offered the cachet of an unparalleled client list that included Woody Allen, Dick Cavett, Robert Klein, and Mike Nichols—not to mention the services of one of the craftiest and most adaptable management teams around.
Jack Rollins, the firm’s founder, was an archetypal Brooklyn macher with a love of harness racing and a cigar perennially dangling from his mouth. His earliest clients had included Harry Belafonte and Lenny Bruce as well as Allen, whom Rollins and his partner, Charles H. Joffe, had helped elevate from an intellectual stand-up to a triple-threat actor, writer, and director. Rollins and Joffe produced Allen’s brainy, lucrative comedies—Joffe himself accepted the Academy Award that Annie Hall won for best picture—and even employed Allen’s father, Martin Konigsberg, as a part-time messenger in New York. Their company, which for the first decade of its existence had been based out of a Manhattan duplex, took on Larry Brezner as a third partner and Buddy Morra as a fourth, and established a satellite office in Los Angeles that, over time, would become its epicenter.
By the time Robin appeared on the radar of the Rollins Joffe firm, it had started working with two other comics whom it was grooming as its next generation of talent. One was David Letterman, who had become a favorite guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and was now starting to fill in occasionally as a host in Johnny’s absence. The other was Billy Crystal, an amiable, rib-poking New York comic and actor with an omnivorous cultural appetite and a repertoire of celebrity impersonations that somehow included both Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali, as well as Sammy Davis Jr. Crystal had missed a possible big break when he was cut from the 1975 debut episode of Saturday Night Live; he was now enjoying national attention as one of television’s first openly gay characters on the ABC sitcom Soap.
Robin had been brought to the firm for a meeting, and was later evaluated in performance by Stu Smiley, a young new employee who had been hired as an assistant to Brezner and Morra. Jack Rollins’s initial assessment of Robin was mixed, to say the least: “The talent is endless; the discipline is nil.” But Smiley, who was much closer in age to Robin than any of the partners at the company, was impressed when he saw one of Robin’s sets at the Comedy Store. “He would do his Shakespearean actor character and he would walk on the tables,” Smiley said. “He was so fearless that you were afraid.”
Smiley, who had just come off a job as a production assistant on Annie Hall, knew Robin was a special individual, and the many months he was about to spend shadowing him would show him just how special. “I knew he could pirouette on a needle,” Smiley said. “I didn’t know that no one else could.”
Robin signed on with the firm, preferring to remain happily in the dark about how it handled his affairs. As Joffe would later boast, “Robin is a neophyte.… That doesn’t interest him. What interests him is his work. That’s what gives me great hope for his growth. What interests me is that twenty years from now, people still care about Robin Williams.”
The managers saw almost unlimited potential in Robin, and they had no hesitation about expressing this to him, and to Valerie. “They wanted him, and that was exciting,” she said. “It’s the next level. You hear that they’re Woody Allen’s managers, and that’s pretty terrific. They took me out to lunch, and I’ll never forget this. They said, ‘You are going to be very, very rich. You are not going to have to do anything anymore. You can lunch and shop.’ I’ll never forget that. Lunch and shop. And I have manners, and I’m polite, and I listened and nodded. But I was so upset afterwards.”
Valerie was happy to see Robin’s career begin to bloom and had no desire to help guide or run it. But she could see that lines were being drawn between what she could and could not be a part of—where she belonged and where she was not wanted. “I wasn’t aspiring to anything,” she said. “I was dancing and enjoying my boyfriend, my life with him. Not that I really wanted any particular role, but now it’s like, okay, this is big and you don’t get to be a part of it. And I really felt shut out.”
Robin had an energy that had turned on the town, a growing reputation that signaled he was going to do something big, and the people who could make it happen for him. Now all he needed was a role.
4
MY FAVORITE ORKAN
In early 1977, before Robin had any noteworthy Hollywood representation or credits, he met with Howard Papush, a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. A successful five-minute set on the program moved you to the front of the line for better stand-up gigs, and for film and TV auditions; an invitation from Johnny to sit on his couch was a crowning accomplishment and a signal to millions of viewers that you had just been inducted into an exclusive pantheon.
Robin knew how vitally important The Tonight Show was to advancing comedy careers, and he had sat in its storied Burbank studio when friends like Jay Leno made their debuts. As Leno later recalled, every time one of his punch lines landed, “you could hear, in the audience, ‘Huh-HAAH!’” he said, imitating Robin’s telltale laugh. Robin seemed destined for such a spot when Papush spotted him at a club in San Diego, where he was “flinging props all over the stage and he was hilarious, and the audience was going nuts,” as Papush described the scene. A longtime talent producer, Papush had helped comics like Steve Martin and Freddie Prinze get on The Tonight Show, and it seemed unthinkable that someone so clearly poised for his breakthrough had escaped his attention. “I just couldn’t believe it,” he said. “It’s like, where did he crawl out of? From under what rock? How come I didn’t know who he is?”
Papush had some apprehensions that Robin’s vulgarity would not be suitable for NBC. “He was saying ‘motherfucker’ and things like that
, but not just to say it—the context of how he was doing it was extraordinary,” he observed. But what worried Papush more was whether Robin could only deliver the same set over and over again, or whether he could vary and update his material from performance to performance. At The Tonight Show, Papush said, “We had an unspoken rule—sometimes it was spoken—that we would not put a new comedian on the show until they had what we deemed was fifteen minutes of good material, so we knew they’d have three spots on the show. Somebody could have five dynamite minutes and then bomb the second time if their material wasn’t up to what it had been the first time. My belief was that likability was a very important factor. It couldn’t be just telling jokes—the audience really had to like you.”
A few weeks after seeing Robin in San Diego, Papush laid out this larger concern to Robin. “I told him that I really wanted to put him on the show, but it was not going to happen right away, because there were issues with the material,” Papush recalled. “At some point I said to him, ‘You know, Robin, you’re a big star already. We just have to work on your material.’ And he looked at me very quizzically.” The idea that his stand-up set was a body of work that needed to be updated and refined simply had not occurred to him. “There are people who have their eye on their career and making it,” Papush said, “and then there are true artists who just do their art, and what happens, happens. When I said to him, ‘You’re a big star,’ he looked at me like, what are you talking about?”
Robin did not get on The Tonight Show this time, though he was determined to take his act to the next level, whatever that meant. But his desperation to make good on the promise others saw in him, combined with a naïve attitude about the entertainment industry, sometimes led him to make poor decisions. As Stu Smiley, his friend and minder at Rollins Joffe, said of Robin in this period, “He would take any job. If he got a call for a birthday party, he would do it.” It was one of the firm’s responsibilities, going forward, to keep him from repeating these mistakes.
Robin’s screen debut could hardly have been less glamorous or auspicious. It was in a film called Can I Do It … Til I Need Glasses?, which happened to be the sequel to If You Don’t Stop It … You’ll Go Blind; both were low-budget, R-rated features consisting of short reenactments of dirty jokes that any borscht belt comedian would dismiss for being too obvious. The poster for the original, released in 1974, was illustrated with a dastardly man in a top hat flashing his body to two buxom, possibly naked women; the sequel, released in the summer of 1977, billed itself as “the nuttiest, naughtiest, looniest, gooniest, funniest madcap comedy of the year.”
Robin appears in two segments in the film. In one, he is seen pacing outside a doctor’s office, wearing his rainbow suspenders and a kerchief tied around his head. As a man in a suit starts to unlock the front door, Robin declares in a Southern yokel’s accent, “Thank goodness you’re here, Doc—I’m new in this town and this tooth is killing me.” “I’m afraid you made a mistake, young man,” the doctor replies. “I’m not a dentist, I’m a gynecologist.” Perplexed, Robin asks why the doctor has hung a picture of a tooth above his office entrance, and this time the doctor answers more forcefully: “Schmuck, what did you expect me to hang up there?” (For completeness, the gag is punctuated with the sound of a slide whistle and the ringing of a bell.)
For his second scene, Robin, dressed in a bow tie and a pair of round John Lennon spectacles with his hair slicked back, plays a courtroom attorney interrogating a large-breasted woman in a low-cut top. In a voice that starts off evenly and grows louder over the course of his inquiry, he asks her, “Is it true, Mrs. Frisbee, that last summer, you had sexual intercourse with a red-headed midget during a thunderstorm, while riding nude in the sidecar of a Kawasaki motorcycle, performing an unnatural act on a Polish plumbing contractor, going sixty miles an hour, up and down the steps of the Washington Monument, on the night of July 14th? Is that true, Mrs. Frisbee? Is that true?”
Having delivered those lines with more craft and thoughtfulness than they deserve, Robin is rewarded with the punch line: the witness looks up at him and asks, “Could you repeat that date again, please?” (At this point, Robin stares balefully into the camera while a trumpet blares a sad wah-wah refrain.) His brief appearances in the film were not worth what little energy he invested in them, and if he thought they were harmless, he would later come to regret them.
Robin followed with his first television roles, many just as ephemeral, but at least not nearly as embarrassing. His stand-up performances had brought him to the attention of George Schlatter, the veteran television producer who had helped make Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, the kooky, counterculture comedy-variety show of the Vietnam War era. Schlatter remembered a performance he had seen at a small club in Santa Monica, where a barefoot Robin, wearing long hair and a long beard, overalls, and a straw hat, hung his microphone stand out over the audience and said, “I’m fishing for assholes.” At that point, Schlatter said, “I became absolutely enamored of this young man and explained to him that if he could clean up his act, I had a job for him.”
When they met again a few days later at Schlatter’s office, Robin was neatly dressed and groomed—in a suit, his hair cut, and his beard trimmed. “Here I am, boss,” he declared. Schlatter marveled to himself at how crude and how cultured Robin could be at the same time. “I wondered, where did this come from?” he said. “Because he knew drama. He knew Shakespeare. And he knew the street. It was impossible for that much knowledge and talent, professionalism, and ability to be all piled up into this one little guy.”
What Schlatter had in mind for Robin was a role in a new incarnation of Laugh-In, one in which a house team of performers and a rotating lineup of celebrity guests would act out comedy sketches in a rapid-fire style. In a cast of thirteen rookie comedians (as well as two puppets), Robin spent part of the summer of 1977 on the MGM Studios lot near Culver City, recording as many as thirty or more segments a day, on sets that looked like leftovers from a bygone age of protest, decorated in polka dots and psychedelic designs. The new Laugh-In offered an awkward juxtaposition of corny setups and knock-downs (“Do you feel that pay TV will catch on?” “I wouldn’t watch TV no matter how much they paid me”) with earnest efforts at topicality and social relevance. In one segment, the cast sang a backhanded tribute to Anita Bryant, the beauty queen and pitchwoman turned antigay activist, set to the tune of “Carolina in the Morning”: “She’s the missionary / Who can sock it to a fairy / In the morning.” Another sketch cast Robin as the cultlike leader of a religious movement not unlike Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (“We believe in life after death—in other words, there’s a sucker reborn every minute”), whose broadcasts evoke children’s shows like The Mickey Mouse Club.
The skits were often banal, but they allowed Robin to share the screen with some of the biggest stars of the day. He sang a duet with Tina Turner and serenaded a visibly impressed Joan Rivers with a spontaneous tune about her movie Rabbit Test. (“Went to bed last night with hair upon my chest / I woke up this morning with a couple of beautiful breasts / You know I’m changing.”) Afterward, Rivers found Robin hard to forget, if only because he never seemed to know when to turn himself off. “You know how it is: You’re struggling, you want to be noticed, and the only way is to be the funny boy,” she later recalled. “We took a picture together—and he never stopped mugging. You wanted to tie him down and say, ‘Stop.’”
In one surprisingly rebellious skit, Robin tried to convince Jimmy Stewart to get with the times and smoke a joint; in another, he managed to elicit some approving chuckles from the sullen Frank Sinatra, who shared his bawdy sense of humor. “When Frank Sinatra looked at him,” Schlatter recalled, “Robin said, ‘I’m so excited I could drop a log!’ Well, when he heard ‘drop a log,’ Sinatra almost fainted. We all were in shock, disbelief, and a bit of awe.”
Robin wasn’t sure the joke would work, either. “I was afraid they’d want to fire me and that I’d have to explain tha
t I’d never meant to upset Uncle Frank,” he said. “Thank God he laughed.”
Bette Davis, another of Robin’s illustrious scene partners on the show, had a brief bit of advice for him: “The one word you’ll need is no.” What Robin took this to mean, he later explained, is that “the secret is to be able to turn things down, to not take on projects … just because they say they want you. If they can’t get you, they’ll get anybody, so wise up.”
That same summer, Robin was cast in another sketch show—one that, unlike Laugh-In, did not try to find a safe middle ground and instead embraced a provocative sensibility. NBC had offered Richard Pryor his own prime-time variety series and gave him free rein to cast and write the program—its latest effort to adapt Pryor’s proudly defiant comedy for a mass viewership. From the outset, the temperamental headliner had one particular demand for what would be called The Richard Pryor Show: according to John Moffitt, who directed the series, “Richard says, ‘For my cast, I want all my friends from the Comedy Store.’ Pause. Beat. Beat. Beat. I asked, ‘But how many of them can act?’ He said, ‘I want them.’ So we went to the Comedy Store and we got the cast.”
Robin was one of those disciples that Pryor selected for his team, along with Sandra Bernhard, Paul Mooney, and several other young comedians. Building upon Pryor’s fearless stand-up act, The Richard Pryor Show focused on comedy sketches—usually with Pryor as their central character—that satirized issues of race and bigotry in America. In one segment, he is cast as the first black president of the United States, fielding questions at a White House press conference. (“I feel it’s time that black people went to space,” he tells one reporter. “White people have been going to space for years.”) In another, he plays the only person of color on an archaeological team that discovers proof that humanity’s earliest ancestors were black people, brought to Earth by extraterrestrial black gods. The punch line is that Pryor’s character is left behind in the tomb along with these revelatory artifacts.
