Robin

by Dave Itzkoff

  The Crazy Ones seemed perfectly calibrated for the older audience cultivated by CBS, which had a track record for giving new lifeblood to bygone TV stars, while the show provided Robin with distinct opportunities to improvise in each episode. It surrounded him with an ensemble of young actors, who helped to offset the fact that Robin was now gaunter and grayer than viewers were accustomed to seeing, and it paid a steady salary of $165,000 an episode—more in a week than he’d earn in a month working for scale on an independent movie.

  But there was an even simpler pleasure about The Crazy Ones. As Robin explained, “It’s a regular job. Day to day, you go to the plant, you put your punch card in, you get out. That’s a good job.”

  In another Letterman appearance that fall, Robin drew parallels between the father-daughter relationship on his show and his real-life relationship with Zak, who by this time had earned an MBA from Columbia University, and who—to hear his father tell it—was hitting his stride while Robin was reaching the end of his usefulness. Slipping into his impersonation of a doddering old man, Robin looked directly into the camera and said, “Where are we going today? ‘To take Daddy out by the sidewalk.’”

  When the first episode of The Crazy Ones aired on September 26, it was met with lukewarm reviews. Unlike Mork & Mindy, which had been filmed in front of a live studio audience that responded to his every ad-lib with uproarious laughter, The Crazy Ones used a single-camera format that was a poor fit for Robin’s talents. The show played like a movie running in an empty theater, and each joke hung awkwardly in the air as it was met with silence. Some critics, at least, were gentle in noting that the Robin of The Crazy Ones was no longer the indefatigable dynamo they had come to adore in an earlier era. “Watching Mr. Williams return to the kind of improvisation-style routines that made him famous in the 1970s is bittersweet, like watching Jimmy Connors play tennis again,” Alessandra Stanley wrote in the New York Times. “They are still impressive, but audiences can’t help recalling how much more elastic and powerful they were at their peak.” Others were not so diplomatic, like the one who simply wrote, “Williams seems exhausted. So is this show.”

  The ratings foretold a bleak outlook: the first episode of The Crazy Ones was watched by about 15.5 million people, a respectable start that suggested at least a curiosity about the series. But within a month, nearly half that audience had tuned out, and the numbers eroded further with each passing week. It was no Mork & Mindy; the magic was gone.

  During the making of The Crazy Ones, Robin lived in Los Angeles, by himself, in a modestly furnished rental apartment. It was a far cry from when he last starred in a Hollywood sitcom, and an even more scaled-down existence than he had established for himself in Tiburon. He didn’t do much socializing off the set, and the visitors he often entertained at work were his comedian pals from the Throckmorton Theatre scene. When his friend Steven Pearl happened to find himself in L.A., he simply called Robin’s personal assistant, Rebecca Erwin Spencer, and asked if he and a companion could visit Robin at a location shoot.

  “We just hung out, watched him film,” Pearl said. “I got to see them shave Robin’s arms for some publicity photos. I’ve never seen anyone get their arms shaved, but that boy was hairy. That boy was Cousin Itt, man.”

  Robin did not disguise to Pearl his motivations for doing The Crazy Ones, any more than Pearl withheld from Robin his true feelings about what he thought was a mediocre show. “He admitted, he was just doing it for the money—‘I’m doing it for the money, I need the money,’” Pearl said. “It was okay. It didn’t crack me up or anything. It wasn’t horrible. There’s stuff on TV that’s just total garbage, man. But I was happy he was working. As his friend, I was hoping the show would run for ten years. But it didn’t. They never give anything a chance to get better anymore, that’s the thing.”

  Robin’s new domestic life with Susan was very different, too. Unlike Marsha, who saw it as her responsibility to decorate and maintain their house, to organize dinner parties and surround him with intellectual friends who kept him stimulated, Susan had been accustomed to living an independent life of her own. She traveled widely by herself and with her sons, and she did not manage Robin’s day-to-day affairs and did not always accompany him when he worked out of town.

  “Any time he traveled, Marsha was very good at putting him in touch with Oliver Sacks or Salman Rushdie or Bob De Niro, so that he was constantly stimulated,” their friend Cyndi McHale explained. “Especially when he was on the road, and away from his family, so that he’d have fun and he’d be engaged. And he wasn’t just having dinner every night with his assistant or his hair and makeup person or his stand-in. They’re all lovely people, but you need to mix it up, for his brain.”

  Other friends, like the comedian Rick Overton, believed that Susan played a crucial role for Robin, even when the two of them were hundreds of miles apart. “She made him happy,” Overton said. “You could see it in his face. I don’t think he had a complete life, but I’m glad that some things were done to give him some comfort.”

  A year earlier, Zak and his wife, Alex, had moved back to San Francisco so that Zak could take a job for a technology start-up in Mountain View and they could be nearer to Robin. Zak and Alex would make lunch for Robin, hang out with his friends, and watch favorite movies with him, everything from classic Japanese anime to Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear Armageddon comedy Dr. Strangelove.

  As Alex saw it, Robin didn’t just enjoy the time he spent with Zak; he depended on his son in a way that he never had before. Growing up, Zak had missed out on crucial time with his father—time that was lost to Robin’s career, his divorce, his dependencies and recoveries. Now their restored connection could be fulfilling but also overwhelming. “That’s when Robin just really needed him, and he would reach out to Zak,” Alex said. “His dad finally was like, ‘I need you, I want to be around you, I want to spend time with you.’ It was everything Zak always wanted, but not the way he wanted it.”

  Throughout this time, Zak was often in contact with Rebecca Erwin Spencer and her husband, Dan, who lived in Corte Madera, near Tiburon, and who Zak felt took good care of Robin. “They were very open and did love him very much—they were pretty good about keeping us in the fold,” he said. “I think there was inclusivity up until a point when things started getting a little weird.”

  That moment came around the time when Robin went to Los Angeles to start working on The Crazy Ones. “I’m kicking myself for not visiting him during that time,” Zak said. “Because I think that was a very lonely period for him. In retrospect, I feel like I should have been there, spending time with him. Because someone who needs support was not getting the support he needed.”

  Starting in October 2013, Robin began to experience a series of physical ailments, varying in their severity and seemingly unconnected to one another. He had stomach cramps, indigestion, and constipation. He had trouble seeing; he had trouble urinating; he had trouble sleeping. The tremors in his left arm had returned, accompanied by the symptoms of cogwheel rigidity, where the limb would inexplicably stop itself at certain fixed points in its range of motion. His voice had diminished, his posture was stooped, and at times he simply seemed to freeze where he stood.

  Susan was used to seeing Robin experience a certain amount of nervousness, but when she spoke to him now, his anxiety levels seemed off the chart. “It was like this endless parade of symptoms, and not all of them would raise their head at once,” she said. “It was like playing whack-a-mole. Which symptom is it this month? I thought, is my husband a hypochondriac? We’re chasing it and there’s no answers, and by now we’d tried everything.”

  Billy Crystal said that Robin began to reveal some of his discomfort, but only up to a point. “He wasn’t feeling well, but he didn’t let on to me all that was going on,” Crystal said. “As he would say to me, ‘I’m a little crispy.’ I didn’t know what was happening, except he wasn’t happy.”

  In the fall, Crystal and his wife, Janice, inv
ited Robin out to see the Joseph Gordon-Levitt comedy Don Jon at a movie theater in Los Angeles. When they met at the parking lot, Crystal said, “I hadn’t seen him in about four or five months at the time, and when he got out of the car I was a little taken aback by how he looked. He was thinner and he seemed a little frail.”

  Over dinner afterward, Crystal said, “He seemed quiet. On occasion, he’d just reach out and hold my shoulder and look at me like he wanted to say something.” When the friends said good-bye at the end of the night, Robin burst out with unexpected affection. “He hugged me good-bye, and Janice, and he started crying,” Crystal said. “I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m just so happy to see you. It’s been too long. You know I love you.’”

  On their car ride home, Crystal said he and Janice were barraged by calls from Robin, sounding tentative and expressing his appreciation for the couple. “Everything’s fine, I just love you so much, ’bye,” went one call. Five minutes later the phone rang again: “Did I get too sappy? Let’s see each other soon.”

  That winter in Los Angeles, Robin was performing with Rick Overton at an improv show called Set List at the iO West comedy club on Hollywood Boulevard. Overton described it as “the hottest, bragging-rights, Top Gun, black-belt version of stand-up,” but also “one of the joys that brought the kid back—that brought the bounce back in his smile.” Robin did not initially want to perform at the show, but Overton talked him into it. “I said, ‘You’re going to look at me with that oh-man-you-were-right look—you won’t even know how right I am until you do it.’ He came back and said, ‘You were totally fucking right.’ And he felt younger. And I said, ‘That’s why I do it.’ I love that feeling of banging up there like a kid and holding on to the mic stand and wondering what’s next.”

  Outside the club that night, they were stopped by a paparazzo photographer with a video camera. The interaction was fleeting, no more than a minute, and Robin answered only a few cursory questions about what advice he would give to up-and-coming performers. “Find a room like this and go on,” he told his ambusher. “This room’s amazing.” But even in that short conversation, it was unmistakable how gaunt and worn down Robin looked.

  Overton came to believe there was something wrong with his friend, even if he did not quite understand what it was. “I saw the eyes dimming,” he later said. “And that’s the gateway to the soul. Like a rheostat in a dining-room light set. I would see that candle flicker brightly when he would do Set List, or come up and do improv. We’d get back to playing like kids. We’d bounce off each other for a little bit, and we’d get access to the old guy again. And then it would start to dim when we’d be hanging out afterwards, at the restaurant. I can’t imagine the weight of it. I can’t even dream of it. I don’t blame him for one damn thing.”

  Before production wrapped on The Crazy Ones in February 2014, its producers made a last-ditch effort to reinvigorate its viewership with a bit of guest casting. Pam Dawber was invited to play a role in one episode, as a possible romantic interest for the Simon Roberts character, marking the first time that she and Robin had performed together since Mork & Mindy, and the first screen role that Dawber—who had stepped back from the business to raise her children with the actor Mark Harmon—had taken in fourteen years.

  Dawber knew the stunt was something that would only be attempted by a TV series faced with the looming threat of cancellation, but she accepted the role anyway. “I did that show only because I wanted to see Robin,” she said. “Not because I thought it was a great show. I thought it was such the wrong show for Robin, and he was working as hard as he could. The couple episodes I saw, I felt so sorry for him, because he was just sweating bullets. He was sweet and wonderful and loving and sensitive. But I would come home and say to my husband, ‘Something’s wrong. He’s flat. He’s lost the spark. I don’t know what it is.’”

  Dawber also drew the conclusion that Robin was experiencing serious health problems, but she felt uncomfortable broaching the subject with him. “In general, he was so not who I knew him to be,” she said. “But I didn’t feel right prying, because I hadn’t been around him. So I did what I could. ‘I hear you have a new marriage.’ ‘Oh, she’s wonderful, she’s so sweet.’” Knowing about Robin’s valve-replacement surgery, Dawber asked him if he was taking any medication for his heart; he told her he was only taking antianxiety medication. “I thought, Hm. Maybe that’s why he’s flat,” she said. “And then he told me he was worried because he was losing all this weight and he didn’t know why, and he was having all these tests run. I said, ‘Have you had your thyroid checked?’ We went into all that stuff. He said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  Robin reached out to Dawber many times over the days that she spent making the episode, thanking her for her involvement. “He was so sweet,” she said. “And I felt like he was wanting to make a connection but didn’t know how. And I almost didn’t know how, because I hadn’t talked to him in so long.”

  Despite its retro-TV reunion hook and the increased promotion it received, Dawber’s episode of The Crazy Ones did nothing to stop the show’s continued ratings slide. Fewer than seven million people watched it—one of the smallest audiences it had drawn to that point—and the next week, its season finale was watched by barely five million people. The following month, CBS canceled the show. Friends like Mark Pitta, who spoke to Robin during this period, believed he was at peace with the network’s decision. “I said to him, ‘How are you doing?’” Pitta recalled. “And he just volunteered it. He goes, ‘Well, my show was canceled.’ I said, ‘How’s that going for you?’ He goes, ‘Well, bad financially. Good creatively.’ I didn’t watch it. I didn’t like it, so I didn’t watch it.”

  By that time, Robin had already moved on to filming Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, the third film in the family comedy franchise. That previous winter, he had shot a portion of the movie in London, and now he was completing the rest of his scenes in Vancouver. Though it was the first big-budget feature that Robin had worked on in some time, it was a project that many people close to him had hoped he would not take—it was clear to them that whatever had been afflicting him was getting worse, and he needed to push the pause button on his career until his mystery illness was brought under control.

  “I thought he knew it was bad,” said Cheri Minns, his makeup artist, who accompanied him on the Night at the Museum set. “I thought he’d wind up taking a year off, and he needed the time to figure out what was going on, because he was not himself.”

  But what proved more powerful than the pleas from his colleagues and from family members like Zak and Alex to slow things down—even more powerful than Robin’s desire to sustain his life with Susan and to be a good earner for his managers and agents—was his own desire to keep working through the pain, the one cure-all that had helped him cope with past troubles.

  “I don’t think he thought he could blow up what he built for himself,” Minns said. “It’s like he didn’t worry about anything when he worked all the time. He operated on working. That was the true love of his life. Above his children, above everything. If he wasn’t working, he was a shell of himself. And when he worked, it was like a lightbulb was turned on.”

  As for the Night at the Museum sequel, Minns said, “That was a nightmare. He shouldn’t have done that movie. That’s how I feel about it.” By the time he reached Vancouver, Robin’s weight loss was severe and his motor impairments were growing harder to disguise. Even his once-prodigious memory was rebelling against him; he was having difficulty remembering his lines.

  “He wasn’t in good shape at all,” Minns said. “He was sobbing in my arms at the end of every day. It was horrible. Horrible. But I just didn’t know.”

  Eventually, Minns called Robin’s managers and told them that he was hurtling toward a breaking point. “I said to his people, ‘I’m a makeup artist—I don’t have this capacity to deal with what’s happening to him,’” she recalled. “Because he’d come to me and c
onfide in me, but I was afraid I was going to say the wrong thing. At night, I was on my computer, looking up ‘How to talk to a paranoid,’ so that I wouldn’t say the wrong thing. I wanted to be supportive.”

  Dawber, too, would get phone calls from Robin while he worked on the film. “But it was like, ‘Robin, you’re sick! You’re sick,’” she said. “He just was moving on a fast track. And there just was something not right.”

  Robin was no longer leaving his hotel room at night, and in April he suffered a panic attack. Minns thought that maybe if he slipped out to a local Vancouver comedy club and performed again, it would lift Robin’s spirits and remind him that audiences still loved him. But instead, her gentle suggestion had a devastating effect. “I said, ‘Robin, why don’t you go and do stand-up?’” she recalled. Robin broke down in tears. “He just cried and said, ‘I can’t, Cheri.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’ He said, ‘I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how to be funny.’ And it was just gut wrenching to hear him admit that, rather than lie to me and say something else. I think that’s how troubled he was about all of it.”

  Susan had remained in California while Robin worked on the movie, but she was in frequent contact with him, too, talking him through his escalating insecurities. Under the supervision of his doctor, Robin started taking different antipsychotic medications, but each prescription only seemed to alleviate some symptoms while making others worse. When Robin finished his work on Night at the Museum and returned home to Tiburon in early May, Susan said her husband was “like a 747 airplane coming in with no landing gear.”

  “Robin was losing his mind and he was aware of it,” she said.

  Susan said that Robin told her he wanted a “reboot for his brain,” but he was stuck in a looping paranoia that would spin around and around in his mind. Every time it seemed as if he had been talked down from the latest obsession, he returned to it all over again, fresh in his mind, as if he were encountering it for the first time.