Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  Robin could be a good husband when he focused on his marriage, but he was an easily distractible person, and his occupation provided him with an unrelenting succession of pleasurable distractions. “Robin was like a giant puppy: ‘Let’s play. Let’s goof around. Let’s do something,’” said Jim Staahl. It didn’t help matters that his work schedule at the show offered plenty of downtime and allowed one form of misbehavior to blend seamlessly into the next.

  “We would get the new script on Monday, do the table read-through, do lunch, and then in the afternoon, maybe block a couple scenes, knock off for the day,” Staahl said. “Monday night, Robin and I would go to the Comedy Store. We would do the show, and then somebody would say, ‘Hey, let’s go to the beach’”—meaning Hermosa Beach, where they would perform at the Comedy Magic Club, and hang out at the home of Molly Madden, a model and agent who was a friend of Dawber’s and a girlfriend of Christopher Reeve’s.

  Staahl, who was going through a divorce at the time, said the crowd at Madden’s house was “people who just showed up at the beach and wanted to have fun,” and that he would go there to “meet the models of her agency. I would go home early—Robin would party hearty.” Whatever the night and whoever the crowd, Robin seemed up for anything, and his appetites and his endurance far exceeded anyone else’s. “He would do our show at the Comedy Store and then he would go across to do the Improv,” Staahl said. “Or he might break with us and wind up in Hermosa Beach. Or he might do two other clubs. More and more and more.”

  Taylor Negron, an actor, comedian, and fellow member of the Comedy Store Players, was also a frequent companion on Robin’s decadent itineraries. Negron said that the scene following a performance by the Comedy Store Players was reliably dissolute. The group’s dressing room would fill “with Lou Reed lookalikes named Hercules and Raquel, all shaking tiny bottles of cocaine.” Then, he said, the search continued for more party fuel: “Robin loved cocaine and we loved Robin, so we went with Robin to parties with sniff in the air. I did not enjoy cocaine. It made me want to vacuum every hallway in every apartment building in the world.”

  Anyone who was a friend of Robin’s, or even on the periphery of his social circle, was a potential source to the National Enquirer and other celebrity tabloids that were scouring Los Angeles for tawdry tales about him. “People were forever looking for stories and angles,” said Staahl. “It would be weird. We would go out, do something, and then a couple days later, I’m reading about stuff in the Enquirer like, yeah, that happened. How did they get that? I’d come to learn that the Enquirer did pay a bounty. You could make five hundred bucks, a thousand bucks if you had firsthand information, and they could somehow vet it. Or you would verify another source, if you said, ‘Yeah, that really happened.’”

  To prevent these misdeeds from going public—ideally, to keep them from happening at all—Valerie was sometimes put in the awkward position of having to ask Robin’s friends to run interference on her behalf. In one instance, Staahl said, Valerie approached him at the Comedy Store and inquired: “You’re not dating anyone right now, are you?” When he said no, she asked him if he would go out with Candy Clark, the actress and model, “so that I can get her away from my husband.” Staahl said he came away from the encounter thinking to himself, “Oh, really, is it like that? Is their relationship that bad?”

  But there was only so much that Valerie could do to conceal their secrets. In July, the New York Post claimed that she and Robin were preparing for a legal separation and a divorce, amid allegations that Robin was “openly running around Hollywood with model Molly Madden.” Valerie was quoted on the record as saying, “I’ve had enough. It’s very embarrassing when your husband is seen all over the place with another woman. I hate the thought of losing him forever but what else can I do?” A few days later, the New York Daily News caught up with Robin and Valerie at Studio 54, where they were attending a birthday party for Andy Warhol and appeared to have reconciled. Robin told the paper that their trip to New York was “a four-day honeymoon,” and, its report observed, “not even the early-hours arrival of Cheryl Tiegs could lure him before the camera with another woman.”

  When Robin appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone that August, he was photographed bare-chested, with tufts of brown hair spreading across his torso and along his upper arms. “Sexuality figures in the Williams appeal,” the rock ’n’ roll magazine observed in its profile. “Not only does he get a huge volume of perfumed come-ons and childishly scrawled invitations in the mail, but he also gets away with more naughty jokes and gestures than anyone I’ve ever seen.… Like Mork, Robin seems to defuse sexuality of its threatening aspects, until lust appears merely to be cuddly raised to the second power. There’s a warmth to his sex humor that keeps it from turning smutty.” The following section of the story described Robin conducting an imaginary conversation with his penis, whose voice he provided in a Señor Wences falsetto. In the interview, Robin rejected the scandalous tabloid coverage of his private life as “nonsense.”

  But at the end of October, Robin was on the cover of People in a story that asked, “Has MORK blown his cork? Success shook his life and marriage, but both are solid now.” The accompanying feature recapitulated the accounts linking Robin to Madden, as well as rumors that during this time Valerie had left Robin to spend time alone in Italy, but Valerie knocked them down as “completely false.”

  Robin dismissed any friction in their marriage as the result of their acclimation to the Los Angeles A-list—“The social ramble ain’t restful,” he said—adding that he and Valerie had to make different adjustments: “They should give courses in Hollywood parties, A and B. Valerie would bristle, ‘Get me out of here.’ But now she’s learned a certain diplomacy.” The lesson Robin said he had to learn for himself was how to slow things down: “It’s like slowly turning off an engine,” he explained. “When you’ve been going at high speed, it’ll keep idling.” But, he added, “We’re not becoming monks.”

  As hard as she tried to put on a diplomatic face, Valerie had no illusions about Robin’s escapades: he was drinking, he was using drugs, and he was committing acts of infidelity. But as surely as she felt honor-bound to keep her husband’s confidences, she also believed that she had to allow him these indulgences, in the hope that his waywardness was somehow providing him with something that he needed as an artist and performer, and that when he sobered up and saw what he’d done wrong, he would do the right thing and come back to her.

  “I just loved that man to pieces,” Valerie said many years later. “And I wanted him to be happy and this was making him happy, so I moved over a lot. And the more I moved over and created space, it left a vacuum. And you know about vacuums. There were a lot of people who really jumped in to fill that vacuum.”

  To see Robin receiving a level of recognition and acclaim that they believed he deserved had been thrilling at first. “That was the adventure, and we were really bonded in that,” Valerie said. But as Robin became increasingly famous, Valerie did not; she felt that she was not welcome in the same social settings, and it drove a wedge between them. “I didn’t get respect, no,” she said. “People wanted him, on his own. It’s unfortunate, but it happens in L.A. There were certain people that were taking him off on rides that I didn’t think were serving him. It didn’t serve us as a couple, and it certainly didn’t serve his health or his talent. He was being dummied down by the drugs and the women. And that was a problem.”

  It was impossible for Valerie to keep tabs on Robin when he was away from her. “L.A. is very spread out, and there were no cell phones,” she said. “We had two cars. And two homes. And he was running wild. And enjoying it.”

  Mork & Mindy, the source of so much of Robin’s good fortune, was not spared from the changes rippling through his life. In the spring of 1979, Robin’s managers renegotiated a doubling of his salary, to $30,000 an episode, as part of an overall deal that was expected to pay him roughly $3 million over the life of the show. But when the
series returned in September, it was not the same wholesome comedy it had been in its first year. Several important cast members had been written off the show, including Conrad Janis and Elizabeth Kerr, who played Mindy’s father and grandmother, and Jeffrey Jacquet, who played their young friend Eugene. They were replaced by new characters like a nosy next-door neighbor (Tom Poston) and Mindy’s pompous cousin (Jim Staahl), as well as a bickering brother and sister (Jay Thomas and Gina Hecht) who ran a New York–style deli.

  In observance of a long-standing television tradition, ABC executives saw that they had a hit show and determined that the best way to preserve it was to change it, making alterations based on the advice of focus groups as well as their own unfathomable caprices. “Basically, the network felt that the older people were dead weight, that they weren’t adding to the show,” said Dale McRaven. “I thought that was a terrible idea. You just don’t get rid of your dad, or your grandmother. And they did. We had to go along with it, and they ate their words and brought some of them back, but it was a little late and the damage had already been done.”

  To make matters worse, ABC had moved Mork & Mindy from Thursday to Sunday, where it was expected to hold its own against Archie Bunker’s Place, a new CBS spin-off of its acclaimed comedy All in the Family. But there was still plenty of life left in the character played by Carroll O’Connor, who later prevailed over Robin at the Emmy Awards for Best Actor in a Comedy Series. Archie Bunker’s Place emerged as the new ratings champion of the night, while viewership for the retooled Mork & Mindy began to decline.

  These changes were dispiriting to the show’s staff, and Robin felt their impact with a particularly personal intensity. The goodness and integrity that audiences perceived in Mork were fundamental to the role, giving Robin the license to be innocent and unsophisticated. But when he was set against new sparring partners who were more knowing and worldly, Robin had to change how he responded to them. Mork became less virtuous, more self-aware, more overtly libidinous and attuned to his own double entendres.

  Pam Dawber noticed this change in course, too, though she felt it was ultimately the fault of the ABC executives and their unwarranted interference. “That screwed up the gist of the show the second year,” she said. “They gave him a whole different agenda and therefore he started leaning into it in a different way.” Eventually ABC realized that the lovable Mork had gained some sharp edges. But by now the network was too intimidated by Robin to tell him to do anything differently, and so they asked Dawber to deliver the note. “They were all, ‘Talk to Robin, he’s not playing the character naïve anymore,’” she said. “They just double-whammied it. They destroyed it themselves and then were mad that Robin was playing it a little differently.”

  Robin himself was mystified as the Mork & Mindy scripts veered into sexualized territory—an episode where Mork becomes a member of the Denver Broncos cheerleading squad; a two-part story line where Mork meets a race of lustful, bikini-clad aliens whose leader was played by Raquel Welch—and the series devolved into what he described as “a T&A show.” Still, he wasn’t sufficiently worked up to take action, and watched these events unfold with frustrated resignation. “Shows like those changed us during the second year, and they weren’t a help,” he later said. “I think people who’d always watched the series just looked at this stuff and said, ‘Jesus, what’s this?’ It didn’t piss me off as much as make me wonder why.”

  At the same time, Robin’s managers had been trying to move him beyond a television career and establish him as a film star. To that end, they had been fiercely defensive of their client, and went so far as to threaten legal action against the producers of Can I Do It … Til I Need Glasses, the bawdy, low-budget bomb of a comedy that Robin had briefly appeared in when he was still breaking into the Los Angeles scene, and which had recently been rereleased to capitalize on his surging fame. Robin’s team contended that it was “an invasion of privacy” and “misleading advertising” for the producers to promote the film as Robin’s first screen role, and a court later ruled that any banners or ads that mentioned Robin’s name had to include at least three other cast members, and could not mention Mork & Mindy.

  In their protectiveness, Robin’s managers also discouraged him from cultivating future projects that did not fit with the future plans they imagined for him. Ever since he and Bennett Tramer had worked together on Reality … What a Concept, the two of them had been discussing ideas for movie screenplays that Tramer would write and Robin would star in. Robin dismissed early on the possibility that he could write anything for himself. “To be funny in print is a real hard thing for me to do,” he said. “I can do it in performing, because it’s straight out, ka-boom. But when I sit down at the typewriter, I feel like an autistic child.”

  Tramer’s stories included one where Robin would play multiple characters, like Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove or Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets, in a story about quintuplets—or possibly sextuplets—who had been separated at birth and grew up unaware of one another, only to be reunited as adults. “I think it ended at the United Nations,” Tramer said of the concept. “The last line was something like, ‘We believe we’re all brothers—in our case, literally.’”

  In another possible script, one that Tramer wanted to call Achoo, Robin would have played a shy, discombobulated chemist who invents a cure for the common cold. And in a third, Robin would play the role of a ten-year-old boy who, inexplicably, becomes thirty years old overnight. This one, Tramer said, would have had a transformation scene like in The Wolfman, “with his hair coming in and thunder cracking and everything.”

  Yet each of these ideas had a fatal flaw that caused it to be turned down: Tramer received some development money from Paramount for Achoo, but the studio pulled out when it learned that Paddy Chayefsky, the dyspeptic, Academy Award–winning screenwriter of Network, was also working on a project about the pharmaceutical industry. The other concepts were dismissed out of hand by Robin’s managers, who considered them untenable, somewhat contrived, and too similar to the character he was already playing on Mork & Mindy. Rejection is a natural and commonplace occurrence in the entertainment industry, but Robin was lately unaccustomed to the phenomenon; he seemed stunned by the rejections and resigned to their outcomes.

  “That was a little depressing,” Tramer said. “Robin’s a very, very sensitive guy. He didn’t take rejection well. Not in terms of throwing furniture around or slashing furniture, but it would dishearten him. And this is normal; you have to pitch a lot of stuff. But he was so used to everything going his way, not in a selfish way, not in a babyish way. To get resistance, I wouldn’t say that ended his wanting to do it. But that was kind of hard.”

  The film that Robin’s managers had in mind for his debut as a leading man was a movie musical version of Popeye, the comic-strip and cartoon sailor, which they had been pursuing for him for more than a year, ever since its original star, Dustin Hoffman, dropped out. Popeye had been the brainchild of the producer Robert Evans, the slick raconteur behind Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown, who had lined up the singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson to create the music, and Jules Feiffer, the cartoonist and screenwriter (Carnal Knowledge), to provide the script. Rather than presenting the slapstick sailor seen in animated shorts and TV cartoons, Feiffer wanted to bring the character back to his ornery roots, as he was depicted in the original E. C. Segar comic strips of the 1930s. John Schlesinger, the Oscar-winning director of Midnight Cowboy, had been Evans’s first choice to direct, but he wasn’t interested; Hal Ashby, the laid-back director of Harold and Maude, Coming Home, and Being There, had briefly been recruited but also departed when Hoffman left. So the project was instead entrusted to Robert Altman, the idiosyncratic filmmaker of M*A*S*H and Nashville, who had no experience with big-budget franchise movies.

  Evans, who was being encouraged to cast Popeye’s lead role with an established star like Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino, later acknowledged that he’d chosen Robin somewha
t impulsively. “Now, I didn’t even know who Robin Williams was, frankly,” Evans said. “But I knew he’d just come out with a series and was the talk of the town. So I said, ‘We could use Robin Williams.’ The name just popped off my tongue.”

  Robin had some misgivings about the role of the muscle-bound mariner, worrying that his unique attributes would get lost in the trappings of a familiar cartoon character. He had also shared the Popeye script with Tramer, who was not impressed. “I said, ‘Unless you talking like Popeye is enough to sell a movie, there’s no story here,’” Tramer recalled. “He said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know.’ But how do you turn down Robert Altman on your first movie?” On the other hand, among those encouraging him to embrace the challenge was his friend Christopher Reeve, who had recently triumphed in the hit film adaptation of Superman.

  Robin agreed to take the role, and when he did, he committed to it fully. He trained in dance and acrobatics, learned to sing the songs, got a close-cropped, dyed-blond hairdo, and convinced himself that this was going to be his cinematic breakthrough. “I also had that dream of getting up to thank the Academy,” he said. “I thought, this is it, this is my Superman, and it’s gonna go through the fuckin’ roof! After the first day on Popeye, I thought, Well, maybe this isn’t it, and I finally wound up going, Oh, God, when is it going to be over?”

  In January 1980, Robin traveled to the Mediterranean island of Malta to begin the six-month shoot for Popeye. The $20 million film was jointly produced by Walt Disney and Paramount Pictures, and Robin was paid a salary of $500,000 plus a small percentage of any potential profits. Shelley Duvall, a frequent actor in Altman’s films and a dead ringer for Olive Oyl, was cast as Popeye’s love interest, despite Evans’s preference for Gilda Radner.

  When Robin arrived for work, wearing oversize forearm prosthetics that cut off his circulation, and saw the ramshackle set for the seaside shantytown of Sweethaven, it struck him as a decidedly inelegant operation. (“Imagine San Quentin on Valium,” he would later say.) And it was all overseen by a director who had never handled a film of this scale—let alone a musical—and who felt little obligation to help get his leading man acclimated. “Altman loved organized chaos,” said Feiffer. “That’s what he was comfortable in. It was quite a brouhaha.”