Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Out of nowhere and through no further effort of his own, Robin was being sought to star in his own network sitcom. As remarkable a prospect as this was for a young actor who’d never had a gig for more than a few weeks, his managers were unsure if they wanted him to take it. “We felt it would be a mistake to put him on television at that point,” Larry Brezner recalled. “I said, ‘Garry, we really think this guy has a film career.” But Marshall had a persuasive way of getting what he wanted, telling Brezner: “Look, we’re just doing Robin. He’s gonna wear his clothing. It will be him.” Sensing that Brezner was coming around to the idea, he added, “This is television, Larry. We’re not doing Greek theater.”

  Buddy Morra, Brezner’s partner, was tasked with telling Robin he was being offered a TV show on the number one television network, produced by the studio responsible for the number one and number two sitcoms, with a guaranteed order of twenty-two episodes, rather than the thirteen that most first-season shows customarily receive. When Morra told him he’d be paid $1,500 a week, Robin, in his innocence, screamed excitedly on the other end of the phone, “Wow!” To which Morra, the old showbiz hand, replied, “Schmuck, it’s $15,000 a week—I was just teasing you.”

  One question remained for Mork & Mindy: Who is Mindy? As Marshall saw it, she had to be a counterbalance to what Robin would bring to Mork: “It needs a Waspy, all-around, very American girl to go against this lunatic,” he said. And the first actress who came to his mind was Pam Dawber, who had recently starred in Sister Terri, a failed TV pilot about a young nun who teaches and coaches gym at an inner-city parish while trying to raise her teenage sister. With no time to write or produce a proper pilot episode of Mork & Mindy, Paramount created a five-minute presentation reel combining footage of Robin in “My Favorite Orkan” with scenes of Dawber in Sister Terri and submitted it to ABC. Marshall was on vacation in the Virgin Islands when he got the call from Gary Nardino, the head of television production at Paramount: “Whatever you said to them, you sold it.”

  This was all news to Pam Dawber, who had no idea she had been cast in anything. Dawber, a twenty-six-year-old actress and former model with the prestigious Wilhelmina agency, was living in New York and had only just started breaking into television and film: she had played one of the guests in A Wedding, the Robert Altman ensemble comedy, and her exclusive TV deal with ABC had so far led to little more than an audition for the title role in Tabitha, a short-lived spin-off of Bewitched.

  On Friday, April 28, Dawber received a call from her agent telling her that Sister Terri had not been picked up as a series, and she assumed that her ABC contract was over. That following Monday, May 1, Dawber’s agent called her again: ABC had just announced its prime-time schedule for the fall, and in the eight p.m. slot on Thursday nights was a show called Mork & Mindy, starring Robin Williams and Pam Dawber. An initial report in the New York Times tepidly described Mork & Mindy as “a comedy about a being from the planet Ork who meets an attractive earth person.” “I never heard about it,” Dawber said. “Now it’s in the press, and when my agent reads me what this show’s about, I was pi-issed.”

  Dawber was somewhat placated by a conversation with Marshall, who told her about the making of “My Favorite Orkan.” As he told her, “This guy doesn’t stay on book. It’s going to be totally different. It’s going to be wonderful. ‘See this, it’s fahny.’” And when she saw the episode for herself, Dawber was completely won over by Robin. “It was like, Sign. Me. Up,” she said. “He was cu-ute. He was sexy. He was funny. He was so different. Not that I was anybody. But you hadn’t seen anything like him. He was just shot out of a cannon.”

  Dawber did not met her screen-partner-to-be until she traveled to Los Angeles later that spring to shoot their first publicity photographs for a series that still had not filmed its first episode. “I’m in hair and makeup,” she said, “and the hair and makeup person tells me that this Robin Williams guy is right next door. ‘You’ve got to meet him. He’s nuts.’” Dawber went in to introduce herself: “I said, ‘Hi, Mork. I’m Mindy.’ And Robin was, on a real, soul level, a very shy guy. So he feigned this broken Russian accent—‘Oh, it’s so nice to meet you. I don’t know what to so say’—Only I didn’t know he was feigning. I went back in and I said to the makeup person, ‘Where’s he from, is he Russian?’ And she said, ‘He’s not Russian! He’s nuts!’”

  Later that night, Robin invited Dawber and a friend of hers to see him perform at the Comedy Store. By the end of the set, she was no longer worried whether she could stand to work with him and instead wondered whether she could keep up. “Oh ho ho—he was so brilliant,” she said. “It was so smart. It was so sophisticated and warm and hysterical. I could hardly believe my luck, watching this guy onstage, and thinking, this is my partner—I hope I know what I’m doing and I don’t get fired!’”

  There was one more hurdle that Robin had to clear before he could begin work on Mork & Mindy. It was discovered that the contract he had signed with George Schlatter, the executive producer of Laugh-In and The Great American Laugh-Off, was so comprehensive that, under its terms, Robin could not permissibly work as a regular cast member in another TV comedy while it was still in effect. Though this deal predated his becoming a Rollins Joffe client, the firm now had to help him pursue a legal remedy that would allow his career to move forward. “He had signed an all-purposes contract with George Schlatter,” Stu Smiley said. Before shooting began on Mork & Mindy, he said, “Robin went to court, every day, to get out of it.”

  For one of the first times, Robin would have to use the services of Gerald Margolis, an entertainment lawyer who would represent him for years to come. “The deal he was under with George Schlatter was very onerous, and Gerry got him out of it, so that he could do Mork & Mindy,” said Cyndi McHale, who would later become Margolis’s girlfriend and then his wife.

  Schlatter disputes that he did anything to stand in Robin’s way or that the termination of his contract was anything other than amicable. “We had an agreement with Robin,” he said. “We had done six shows, and we had an option for six more shows.” But when Robin made his guest appearance on Happy Days, Schlatter said, “it was just obvious what was going to happen with him. They offered him a series. So we let him out to go do Mork & Mindy. You just can’t hold on to people forever, you know? But I loved him. I just loved him.”

  Robin returned to the Bay Area in the spring to participate in a fund-raising concert for the Boarding House, a local venue that had featured him as a novice stand-up comedian and was now having financial difficulties. He was hardly the best-known name at this four-hour show, held at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium on May 17. But it was an opportunity for him to play in front of one of the biggest live audiences he’d ever had, about seventy-five hundred people, and to share a bill with performers like Steve Martin, Martin Mull, and Billy Crystal. Crystal had previously seen Robin perform improv with John Ritter in Harvey Lembeck’s acting workshop and knew Robin was a promising talent. “When they went toe-to-toe, John was hilarious, but Robin was fearless,” he said. “You could see right away, who’s this guy?”

  Robin saw things in a slightly different light: “We were very competitive at first,” he said. “It was like two elks spraying musk. We were both marking our territory.”

  Crystal delivered a well-regarded routine of character pieces: a former boxer who now sells peanuts at the arenas where he used to fight; a weathered old black jazz musician who’s working his way down the nightclub ladder, but still takes pride in his old lady, his music, and his horn. He thought he’d done fine that night, but when Robin came out a few performers later, he felt he was witnessing something monumental. “It was electric, and we all just sat there and went, ‘Oh my god, what is this?’” Crystal later recalled. “It was like trying to catch a comet with a baseball glove.”

  In his twenty-minute set, Robin delivered a characteristic cross-section of the jokes he told to adult audiences: a mixture of drug humor, ethnic acc
ents, and a monster-movie parody called Attack of the Killer Vibrators. But as the frenzied routine neared its end, after he had recited a few lines from his Shakespearean actor character, he transitioned to a self-doubting bit in which the different parts of his consciousness grapple with his fear that his act is falling apart as he is performing it. Or, as Robin put it: “Come inside my mind and see what it’s like when a comedian eats the big one.”

  Beginning, in his own voice, with a confident declaration—“That piece was incredible! I’m fantastic”—he switches to a serpentine Peter Lorre character, who retorts, “No you’re not, you fool. You’re just using pee-pee ca-ca. You’re nothing. You liar. You’re not doing an act. No material. No substance. No truth.” There are further assessments offered by his rational mind, his subconscious, and his intellect, which, as if it were a panicked radio dispatcher, calls out: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! All systems overload, anything goes now! Try anything!… Career over! Eating the big one! All alerts! Try Vegas ending!”

  “Hey, you’ve been fantastic,” Robin says as himself.

  The intellect responds frantically, “Not buying the bullshit, you’re over! Release honesty response!”

  Robin desperately cries out, “Well, fuck you, what do you want from me anyway?”

  Here, the crowded auditorium applauded, cheered, and hooted its approval.

  Crystal was blown away by what he had just witnessed. “The audience knew him from performing in the clubs there, so he already had a following,” he said. “But it increased, at least by one, from when I saw him. The closest I could make to it was Jonathan Winters, but it was at warp speed. He could say things that weren’t really funny, sometimes, but there was a commitment to the mania that they would go nuts for. And you’d go, That’s not really funny. But it would go over huge because he was doing it.”

  Crystal, who was about to return to Los Angeles for the second season of Soap, knew that Robin was preparing for his starring role in Mork & Mindy, and he envied Robin for it. “There was a level of jealousy, but it wasn’t about his gifts,” Crystal said. “It was that I was going to be confined to one character, and he walked around with a million in his mind, and had a character that would let him do all of them.”

  With the opportunity of a lifetime awaiting him, Robin and Valerie decided to get married that summer, just a few weeks before Robin had to report to work. “It was just like, of course we were going to be together,” Valerie said. “Now there’s money and I didn’t have to work, and he was starting to support us. He had managers and I get to lunch and shop. The next step is, what do people do in their twenties? They get married.”

  Robin held his bachelor party on the night of June 3, an evening that culminated at the Holy City Zoo, where several of his friends and fellow comedians performed long-form improvisational sketches for his entertainment. In a rare tranquil moment, one of the guests, Don Stitt, an actor and playwright, turned to Robin and asked him, “Hey, what’s happening with your career?”

  Robin replied, “I’ve just signed on for six weeks with a show that may be the end of my career.” Stitt, who was headed to New York to pursue work on Broadway, told Robin that if he ever needed a job, he would get him a gig as a stage manager.

  The next day, June 4, 1978, Robin and Valerie were married in an outdoor ceremony on a hill near Tiburon, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. Robin’s half brother Todd served as his best man, and all the members of the wedding party dressed in white, including the bride, the groom, their parents, and their families. Rick and Ruby, the musical comedy act for whom Robin had occasionally opened in San Francisco, performed at the reception. Then the newlyweds traveled to Kauai for their honeymoon. For at least a couple of weeks, it felt as if the whole world belonged only to them.

  Though Valerie had known Robin and his family for just a short while, she could see the influence that his parents exerted on him. “He had both of them very strongly implanted in him,” Valerie said. “He was always delighting his mother, who adored him. His father was stern—he was a very serious, serious person. And I loved the Rob in him so much. I think that acceptance is what bonded us. I allowed and accepted him to be Rob. When he came home, he would sit and be quiet. He was very quiet, a lot, with me. And I liked that. I like a quiet person around the house. He was percolating.”

  When it was just the two of them, Valerie said, “We had a very rich life together, alone. I was his family life.”

  Robin went to Los Angeles in July to start work on the first episode of Mork & Mindy. The story, set in the present day of 1978, begins with Mork on his home planet of Ork, dressed in a slightly upgraded version of the red jumpsuit he wore on Happy Days. Standing in a barren, vaguely futuristic room and speaking to a blinking, egg-shaped beacon, Mork receives orders from his commander, Orson, to travel to Earth—“an insignificant planet on the far side of the galaxy”—to learn about its primitive societies and to rein in his own impulses for mischief-making. “These constant displays of humor are not acceptable here on Ork,” Orson tells him in a booming monotone. “Emotions have been weeded out of us for the good of the race, and you constantly make jokes. I’m afraid that won’t do.”

  Accepting his assignment, Mork rolls his eyes back in his head, twists his earlobes, and offers a strange alien salutation: “Nanu, nanu.”

  Mork pilots his egg-shaped spaceship to Earth, where he crash-lands on the outskirts of Boulder (followed by a second egg containing his luggage). There, he encounters Mindy, who is breaking up with a boyfriend who has gotten too frisky with her. Mindy mistakes Mork for a priest—he is wearing a suit and tie on backward—and walks back to town with him. By the time they have reached her house, she realizes that he is from outer space. At first, Mindy is fearful of her interstellar visitor, then excited to learn that alien life exists.

  But Mork discourages her from revealing his secret to the wider world. “You see,” he tells her, “my mission is to observe Earth, and the only way I can do that is by being one of you, a face in the crowd, which is easy because I fit right in.”

  “Not really,” Mindy answers.

  Together they forge a pact to teach each other about their cultures, and Mindy helps Mork argue his way out of a legal hearing where a prosecutor and a psychiatrist are attempting to have him declared insane. “While it’s true that the defendant may add a new dimension to the word eccentric,” a judge finally rules, “there is no law against that.”

  Dale McRaven, the comedy writer who created Mork & Mindy with Garry Marshall and Joe Glauberg, and who wrote its debut episode, said that the appeal of the show rested in its promise of unrestricted creative freedom—a spirit that was embodied in Robin’s portrayal of Mork and extended to nearly every other part of the program.

  “Garry basically said, ‘Look, if you do the show, do whatever you want to do,’ and that was very intriguing, so he wasn’t putting any limits on me,” McRaven explained. “I came up with the idea of him being sent to Earth as a torture, basically for having a sense of humor. And I realized it was a good opportunity to make fun of ourselves.”

  Howard Storm, who directed the first episode and became the director of the series, said in the first week he worked with Robin, “I was frightened to death.

  “We shot on Friday,” Storm explained, “and we used to block cameras on Thursday and Friday morning. Wednesday, Robin didn’t say a sentence that was written. I didn’t hear a word of the script. And I thought on Thursday: ‘This is it. I’m finished. It’s over. What are we going to do? He doesn’t know the lines. It’s my responsibility.’ And Thursday morning, he walked in at nine o’clock and he knew every line. Knew all his marks. What I realized is, he finally read the script that night. He had a photographic memory. He just looked the script over and had it. When he did, I thought, ‘Oh, thank God, my job is safe. I don’t have to become a shoe salesman.’”

  At a time when nearly all of TV’s top comedies were about friends or families who lived together—Laverne & Shi
rley, Happy Days, Three’s Company, All in the Family, One Day at a Time—the notion of a sitcom where one lead character was an extraterrestrial with paranormal powers was genuinely daring. And, astonishingly, the earliest critical assessments of the show were enthusiastically positive. Reviewing the pilot, the Los Angeles Times wrote that it was “nothing less than uproarious” and “a prime contender for best new comedy of the season.”

  “The reason,” the review continued, “can be summed up in two words: Robin Williams.… He’s fantastic—wild, inventive, unpredictable. He’s a major comedic talent with an arsenal that includes crazy voices, credible imitations, excellent timing and a zany spontaneity that makes him refreshing and immensely likable.” The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Mork & Mindy was “this season’s most innovative comedy, shedding a new spotlight on that old chestnut—human nature—and allowing it to glow in its own built-in comedy. Because Mork isn’t human, our frailties are as much a subject of curiosity as anything else. Not knowing enough himself to be critical, Mork accepts what he sees on face value and turns the whole shady business of living into a series of misunderstandings which aim right for belly laughs, and hit the target.” And the Boston Globe wrote that Robin “soon may be known as the funniest man on television.”

  On September 11, People magazine published a modest feature on Robin, accompanied by a photo of him wearing a feathered headband and spoons over his eyes; captured in mid-jump, he almost seemed to be levitating. And he was a sufficiently hot prospect to ABC that the network flew Valerie and him to New Orleans on Friday, September 15, so that they could be in the audience at the Superdome for the much anticipated boxing rematch between Muhammad Ali and Leon Spinks. While Ali was winning his championship belt back from Spinks, Robin was mingling in the stands with celebrity guests like Tony Curtis and Sylvester Stallone and appearing in an interview with the sportscaster Frank Gifford, who seemed baffled by Mork’s strange Orkan slang and generally unclear of who Robin was or why he was talking to him.